Sha Zhao

dblp:120/1603 · DBLP profile ↗
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37ranked-venue papers
13as first author
27since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0003-4628-5198ORCID · verified

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 18 · 5 first-author · 16 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 9 · 2 first-author · 3 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 7 · 3 first-author · 7 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 6 · 2 first-author · 5 since 2021Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 5 · 3 first-author · 2 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 EMOD: A Unified EEG Emotion Representation Framework Leveraging V-A Guided Contrastive Learning
abstract
Emotion recognition from EEG signals is essential for affective computing and has been widely explored using deep learning. While recent deep learning approaches have achieved strong performance on single EEG emotion datasets, their generalization across datasets remains limited due to the heterogeneity in annotation schemes and data formats. Existing models typically require dataset-specific architectures tailored to input structure and lack semantic alignment across diverse emotion labels. To address these challenges, we propose EMOD: A Unified EEG Emotion Representation Framework Leveraging Valence–Arousal (V–A) Guided Contrastive Learning. EMOD learns transferable and emotion-aware representations from heterogeneous datasets by bridging both semantic and structural gaps. Specifically, we project discrete and continuous emotion labels into a unified V–A space and formulate a soft-weighted supervised contrastive loss that encourages emotionally similar samples to cluster in the latent space. To accommodate variable EEG formats, EMOD employs a flexible backbone comprising a Triple-Domain Encoder followed by a Spatial-Temporal Transformer, enabling robust extraction and integration of temporal, spectral, and spatial features. We pretrain EMOD on 8 public EEG datasets and evaluate its performance on three benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that EMOD achieves the state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating strong adaptability and generalization across diverse EEG-based emotion recognition scenarios.
Yuning Chen, Sha Zhao, Shijian Li, Gang Pan 0001
AAAI2
2026 EEG Agent: A Unified Framework for Automated EEG Analysis Using Large Language Models
abstract
Scalable and generalizable analysis of brain activity is essential for advancing both clinical diagnostics and cognitive research. Electroencephalography (EEG), a non-invasive modality with high temporal resolution, has been widely used for brain states analysis. However, most exiting EEG models are usually tailored for single specific tasks, limiting their utility in realistic scenarios where EEG analysis often involves multi-task and continuous reasoning. In this work, we introduce EEG Agent, a general-purpose framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to schedule and plan multiple tools to automatically complete EEG-related tasks. EEG Agent is capable of performing the key functions: EEG basic information perception, spatiotemporal EEG exploration, EEG event detection, interaction with users, and EEG report generation. To realize the capabilities, we design a toolbox composed of different tools for EEG preprocessing, feature extraction, event detection, etc. These capabilities were evaluated on public datasets, and our EEG Agent can support flexible and interpretable EEG analysis, highlighting its potential for real-world clinical applications.
Sha Zhao, Mingyi Peng, Haiteng Jiang, Shijian Li
AAAI1
2026 S³: Spiking Neurons as an Isolating Segmenter for Brain Signal Decoding
abstract
Recent brain decoding studies have primarily emphasized the development of brain decoders, while largely neglecting the segmentation step. Existing methods typically adopt fixed-length segmentation, which might overlook subject- or task-level variability and disrupt temporal patterns within brain signals. To address this gap, we propose S3, which leverages spiking neurons as an isolating segmenter for brain signal decoding. S3 segments brain signals adaptively, considering subject- and task-level variability while preserving intrinsic temporal patterns of brain signals. It exploits the unique reset mechanism of spiking neurons to isolate previous irrelevant temporal patterns during the generation of each segmentation point. To optimize S3 for enhancing task performance in the absence of segmentation labels, we develop an optimization method where segmentation pseudo-labels are created with a stochastic-greedy algorithm to optimize them, while circumventing gradient blockade between S3 and task performance. Experiments on 10 downstream tasks across 13 public datasets demonstrate that S3 consistently outperforms existing methods, validating its effectiveness, generalizability and interpretability.
Sha Zhao, Shi Gu, De Ma, Huajin Tang, Gang Pan 0001
AAAI3
2026 EEGDiffuser: Label-guided EEG signals synthesis via diffusion model for BCI applications
Jiquan Wang, Sha Zhao, Zhiling Luo, Yangxuan Zhou, Shijian Li, Gang Pan 0001
Neurocomputing2
2026 Cross-subject EEG-based emotion recognition leveraging multi-source domain adaptation with curriculum leaning strategy
Sha Zhao, Yitian Liu, Shijian Li, Gang Pan 0001
Neurocomputing1
2025 Personalized Sleep Staging Leveraging Source-free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
abstract
Sleep staging is important for monitoring sleep quality and diagnosing sleep-related disorders. Recently, numerous deep learning-based models have been proposed for automatic sleep staging using polysomnography recordings. Most of them are trained and tested on the same labeled datasets which results in poor generalization to unseen target domains. However, they regard the subjects in the target domains as a whole and overlook the individual discrepancies, which limits the model's generalization ability to new patients (i.e., unseen subjects) and plug-and-play applicability in clinics. To address this, we propose a novel Source-Free Unsupervised Individual Domain Adaptation (SF-UIDA) framework for sleep staging, leveraging sequential cross-view contrasting and pseudo-label based fine-tuning. It is actually a two-step subject-specific adaptation scheme, which enables the source model to effectively adapt to newly appeared unlabeled individual without access to the source data. It meets the practical needs in real-world scenarios, where the personalized customization can be plug-and-play applied to new ones. Our framework is applied to three classic sleep staging models and evaluated on three public sleep datasets, achieving the state-of-the-art performance.
Yangxuan Zhou, Sha Zhao, Jiquan Wang, Haiteng Jiang, Shijian Li, Benyan Luo, Gang Pan 0001
AAAI2
2025 CBraMod: A Criss-Cross Brain Foundation Model for EEG Decoding
abstract
Electroencephalography (EEG) is a non-invasive technique to measure and record brain electrical activity, widely used in various BCI and healthcare applications. Early EEG decoding methods rely on supervised learning, limited by specific tasks and datasets, hindering model performance and generalizability. With the success of large language models, there is a growing body of studies focusing on EEG foundation models. However, these studies still leave challenges: Firstly, most of existing EEG foundation models employ full EEG modeling strategy. It models the spatial and temporal dependencies between all EEG patches together, but ignores that the spatial and temporal dependencies are heterogeneous due to the unique structural characteristics of EEG signals. Secondly, existing EEG foundation models have limited generalizability on a wide range of downstream BCI tasks due to varying formats of EEG data, making it challenging to adapt to. To address these challenges, we propose a novel foundation model called CBraMod. Specifically, we devise a criss-cross transformer as the backbone to thoroughly leverage the structural characteristics of EEG signals, which can model spatial and temporal dependencies separately through two parallel attention mechanisms. And we utilize an asymmetric conditional positional encoding scheme which can encode positional information of EEG patches and be easily adapted to the EEG with diverse formats. CBraMod is pre-trained on a very large corpus of EEG through patch-based masked EEG reconstruction. We evaluate CBraMod on up to 10 downstream BCI tasks (12 public datasets). CBraMod achieves the state-of-the-art performance across the wide range of tasks, proving its strong capability and generalizability. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/wjq-learning/CBraMod.
Jiquan Wang, Sha Zhao, Zhiling Luo, Yangxuan Zhou, Haiteng Jiang, Shijian Li, Gang Pan 0001
ICLR2
2025 BrainUICL: An Unsupervised Individual Continual Learning Framework for EEG Applications
abstract
Electroencephalography (EEG) is a non-invasive brain-computer interface technology used for recording brain electrical activity. It plays an important role in human life and has been widely uesd in real life, including sleep staging, emotion recognition, and motor imagery. However, existing EEG-related models cannot be well applied in practice, especially in clinical settings, where new patients with individual discrepancies appear every day. Such EEG-based model trained on fixed datasets cannot generalize well to the continual flow of numerous unseen subjects in real-world scenarios. This limitation can be addressed through continual learning (CL), wherein the CL model can continuously learn and advance over time. Inspired by CL, we introduce a novel Unsupervised Individual Continual Learning paradigm for handling this issue in practice. We propose the BrainUICL framework, which enables the EEG-based model to continuously adapt to the incoming new subjects. Simultaneously, BrainUICL helps the model absorb new knowledge during each adaptation, thereby advancing its generalization ability for all unseen subjects. The effectiveness of the proposed BrainUICL has been evaluated on three different mainstream EEG tasks. The BrainUICL can effectively balance both the plasticity and stability during CL, achieving better plasticity on new individuals and better stability across all the unseen individuals, which holds significance in a practical setting.
Yangxuan Zhou, Sha Zhao, Jiquan Wang, Haiteng Jiang, Shijian Li, Gang Pan 0001
ICLR2
2025 Wearable Music2Emotion : Assessing Emotions Induced by AI-Generated Music through Portable EEG-fNIRS Fusion
Sha Zhao, Song Yi, Yangxuan Zhou, Jiadong Pan, Jiquan Wang, Shijian Li, Shurong Dong, Gang Pan 0001
ACM Multimedia1
2025 SPICED: A Synaptic Homeostasis-Inspired Framework for Unsupervised Continual EEG Decoding
abstract
Human brain achieves dynamic stability-plasticity balance through synaptic homeostasis, a self-regulatory mechanism that stabilizes critical memory traces while preserving optimal learning capacities. Inspired by this biological principle, we propose SPICED: a neuromorphic framework that integrates the synaptic homeostasis mechanism for unsupervised continual EEG decoding, particularly addressing practical scenarios where new individuals with inter-individual variability emerge continually. SPICED comprises a novel synaptic network that enables dynamic expansion during continual adaptation through three bio-inspired neural mechanisms: (1) critical memory reactivation, which mimics brain functional specificity, selectively activates task-relevant memories to facilitate adaptation; (2) synaptic consolidation, which strengthens these reactivated critical memory traces and enhances their replay prioritizations for further adaptations and (3) synaptic renormalization, which are periodically triggered to weaken global memory traces to preserve learning capacities. The interplay within synaptic homeostasis dynamically strengthens task-discriminative memory traces and weakens detrimental memories. By integrating these mechanisms with continual learning system, SPICED preferentially replays task-discriminative memory traces that exhibit strong associations with newly emerging individuals, thereby achieving robust adaptations. Meanwhile, SPICED effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting by suppressing the replay prioritization of detrimental memories during long-term continual learning. Validated on three EEG datasets, SPICED show its effectiveness. More importantly, SPICED bridges biological neural mechanisms and artificial intelligence through synaptic homeostasis, providing insights into the broader applicability of bio-inspired principles.
Yangxuan Zhou, Sha Zhao, Jiquan Wang, Haiteng Jiang, Shijian Li, Gang Pan 0001
NeurIPS2
2025 M-MDD: A multi-task deep learning framework for major depressive disorder diagnosis using EEG
Yilin Wang 0014, Sha Zhao, Haiteng Jiang, Shijian Li, Gang Pan 0001
Neurocomputing2
2025 EEGMamba: An EEG foundation model with Mamba
Jiquan Wang, Sha Zhao, Zhiling Luo, Yangxuan Zhou, Shijian Li, Gang Pan 0001
Neural Networks2
2024 Generalizable Sleep Staging via Multi-Level Domain Alignment
abstract
Automatic sleep staging is essential for sleep assessment and disorder diagnosis. Most existing methods depend on one specific dataset and are limited to be generalized to other unseen datasets, for which the training data and testing data are from the same dataset. In this paper, we introduce domain generalization into automatic sleep staging and propose the task of generalizable sleep staging which aims to improve the model generalization ability to unseen datasets. Inspired by existing domain generalization methods, we adopt the feature alignment idea and propose a framework called SleepDG to solve it. Considering both of local salient features and sequential features are important for sleep staging, we propose a Multi-level Feature Alignment combining epoch-level and sequence-level feature alignment to learn domain-invariant feature representations. Specifically, we design an Epoch-level Feature Alignment to align the feature distribution of each single sleep epoch among different domains, and a Sequence-level Feature Alignment to minimize the discrepancy of sequential features among different domains. SleepDG is validated on five public datasets, achieving the state-of-the-art performance.
Jiquan Wang, Sha Zhao, Haiteng Jiang, Shijian Li, Gang Pan 0001
AAAI2
2024 CareSleepNet: A Hybrid Deep Learning Network for Automatic Sleep Staging
abstract
Sleep staging is essential for sleep assessment and plays an important role in disease diagnosis, which refers to the classification of sleep epochs into different sleep stages. Polysomnography (PSG), consisting of many different physiological signals, e.g. electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrooculogram (EOG), is a gold standard for sleep staging. Although existing studies have achieved high performance on automatic sleep staging from PSG, there are still some limitations: 1) they focus on local features but ignore global features within each sleep epoch, and 2) they ignore cross-modality context relationship between EEG and EOG. In this paper, we propose CareSleepNet, a novel hybrid deep learning network for automatic sleep staging from PSG recordings. Specifically, we first design a multi-scale Convolutional-Transformer Epoch Encoder to encode both local salient wave features and global features within each sleep epoch. Then, we devise a Cross-Modality Context Encoder based on co-attention mechanism to model cross-modality context relationship between different modalities. Next, we use a Transformer-based Sequence Encoder to capture the sequential relationship among sleep epochs. Finally, the learned feature representations are fed into an epoch-level classifier to determine the sleep stages. We collected a private sleep dataset, SSND, and use two public datasets, Sleep-EDF-153 and ISRUC to evaluate the performance of CareSleepNet. The experiment results show that our CareSleepNet achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the three datasets. Moreover, we conduct ablation studies and attention visualizations to prove the effectiveness of each module and to analyze the influence of each modality.
Jiquan Wang, Sha Zhao, Haiteng Jiang, Yangxuan Zhou, Zhenghe Yu, Shijian Li, Gang Pan 0001
IEEE J. Biomed. Health Informatics2
2024 PU-Detector: A PU Learning-based Framework for Real Money Trading Detection in MMORPG
abstract
Massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) have been becoming one of the most popular and exciting online games. In recent years, a cheating phenomenon called real money trading (RMT) has arisen and damaged the fantasy world in many ways. RMT is the sale of in-game items, currency, or even characters to earn real money, breaking the balance of the game economy ecosystem and damaging the game experience. Therefore, some studies have emerged to address the problem of RMT detection. However, they cannot well handle the label uncertainty problem in practice, where there are only labeled RMT samples (positive samples) and unlabeled samples, which could either be RMT samples or normal transactions (negative samples). Meanwhile, the trading relationship between RMTers is modeled in a simple way, leading to some normal transactions being falsely classified as RMT. In this article, we propose PU-Detector, a novel framework based on PU learning (learning from positive and unlabeled data) for RMT detection, considering the fact that there are only labeled RMT samples and other unlabeled transactions. We first automatically estimate the likelihood of one transaction being RMT by developing an improved PU learning method and proposing an assessment rule. Sequentially, we use the estimated likelihood as edge weight to construct a trading graph to learn trader representation. Then, with the trader representations and basic trading features, we detect RMT samples by the improved PU learning method. PU-Detector is evaluated on a large-scale real world dataset consisting of 33,809,956 transaction logs generated by 43,217 unique players. Compared with other approaches, it achieves the state-of-the-art performance and demonstrates its advantages in detecting underlying RMT samples.
Yilin Wang 0014, Sha Zhao, Runze Wu 0001, Yuhong Xu, Jianrong Tao, Tangjie Lv, Shijian Li, Zhipeng Hu, Gang Pan 0001
ACM Trans. Knowl. Discov. Data2
2023 Loan Fraud Users Detection in Online Lending Leveraging Multiple Data Views
abstract
In recent years, online lending platforms have been becoming attractive for micro-financing and popular in financial industries. However, such online lending platforms face a high risk of failure due to the lack of expertise on borrowers' creditworthness. Thus, risk forecasting is important to avoid economic loss. Detecting loan fraud users in advance is at the heart of risk forecasting. The purpose of fraud user (borrower) detection is to predict whether one user will fail to make required payments in the future. Detecting fraud users depend on historical loan records. However, a large proportion of users lack such information, especially for new users. In this paper, we attempt to detect loan fraud users from cross domain heterogeneous data views, including user attributes, installed app lists, app installation behaviors, and app-in logs, which compensate for the lack of historical loan records. However, it is difficult to effectively fuse the multiple heterogeneous data views. Moreover, some samples miss one or even more data views, increasing the difficulty in fusion. To address the challenges, we propose a novel end-to-end deep multiview learning approach, which encodes heterogeneous data views into homogeneous ones, generates the missing views based on the learned relationship among all the views, and then fuses all the views together to a comprehensive view for identifying fraud users. Our model is evaluated on a real-world large-scale dataset consisting of 401,978 loan records of 228,117 users from January 1, 2019, to September 30, 2019, achieving the state-of-the-art performance.
Sha Zhao, Yongrui Huang, Shijian Li, Gang Pan 0001
AAAI1
2023 Spatio-temporal analysis of urban crime leveraging multisource crowdsensed data
Binbin Zhou 0005, Longbiao Chen, Sha Zhao, Fangxun Zhou, Shijian Li, Gang Pan 0001
Pers. Ubiquitous Comput.3
2023 Explainable AI for Cheating Detection and Churn Prediction in Online Games
abstract
Online gaming is a multibillion dollar industry that entertains a large, global population. Empowering online games with AI has made a great success, however, ignores the explainability of black-box model makes AI less responsible and hinders its further development. In this article, we introduce and discuss the audience and the concept of XAI (eXplainable AI) in online games. We propose a GXAI workflow, which combines the strong expressiveness of multiview data sources and the clear transparency of multiview black-box models. We present four specific classifiers and explainers in the character portrait view, the behavior sequence view, the client image view, and the social graph view. Experiments conducted on real-world datasets for game cheating detection and player churn prediction show the accuracy of classification and the rationality of explanation. We also discover and present numerous interesting and valuable findings from the individual, local, and global explanations. We implement and deploy three practical applications, including evidence and reason generation, model debugging and testing, and model compression and comparison in NetEase Games and have received quite positive reviews from user studies. More future work is in progress since this is the first work that introduces XAI in online games.
Jianrong Tao, Runze Wu 0001, Tangjie Lyu, Changjie Fan, Zhipeng Hu, Sha Zhao, Gang Pan 0001
IEEE Trans. Games9
2023 Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Crime Risk Prediction Across Cities
abstract
Crime risk prediction is crucial for city safety and residents’ life quality. However, without labeled data, it is challenging to predict crime risk in cities. Due to municipal regulations and maintenance costs, it is not trivial for many cities to collect high-quality labeled crime data. In particular, some cities have lots of labeled data while others may have few. It has been possible to develop a crime prediction model for a city without labeled crime data by learning knowledge from a city with abundant data. Nevertheless, the inconsistency of relevant context data between cities exacerbates the difficulty of this prediction task. To this end, this article proposes an effective unsupervised domain adaptation model (UDAC) for crime risk prediction across cities while addressing the contexts’ inconsistency issue. More specifically, we first identify several similar source city grids for each target city grid. Based on these source city grids, we then construct auxiliary contexts for the target city, to make contexts consistent between the two cities. A dense convolutional network with unsupervised domain adaptation is designed to learn high-level representations for accurate crime risk prediction and simultaneously learn domain-invariant features for domain adaptation. The effectiveness of our model is verified through extensive experiments using three real-world datasets.
Binbin Zhou 0005, Longbiao Chen, Sha Zhao, Shijian Li, Zengwei Zheng, Gang Pan 0001
IEEE Trans. Comput. Soc. Syst.3
2022 T-Detector: A Trajectory based Pre-trained Model for Game Bot Detection in MMORPGs
abstract
Game bots are programmed to automatically play games and illegally obtain profit, seriously affecting game experience of honest players and breaking the balance of game ecosystem. Therefore, bot detection needs to be addressed urgently, especially for MMORPGs, one of the most rapidly expanding genres of games. There have been some studies for bot detection, but the features they used are dependent on specific games and the methods cannot be generalized to other games. In this paper, we propose a trajectory based pre-trained model for game bot detection from game character trajectories and mouse trajectories, named T-Detector, which is independent to specific games and can be generalized to others. More specifically, we propose a pretrain method of LocationTime2Vec to learn representations of trajectories from huge unlabeled samples, which deeply embed spatial and temporal information hidden in trajectories. Moreover, we extract universal features based on behavioral differences in movement trajectories between human players and bots. We design an Angle Pretrain to extract features of turning angle, and propose an attention pooling module to extract features of moving speed and distance. Such features are not dependent on any specific game, enabling T-Detector to be generalized to many MMORPGs. Evaluated by two large-scale real-world datasets of 143,938 samples from two MMORPGs, T-Detector achieves the state-of-the-art performance in bot detection, and demonstrates powerful generalization ability.
Sha Zhao, Junwei Fang, Runze Wu 0001, Jianrong Tao, Shijian Li, Gang Pan 0001
ICDE1
2022 Rapid Earthquake Magnitude Estimation Using Deep Learning
abstract
Earthquake magnitude estimation is one of the critical parts of earthquake early warning systems. It uses the first few seconds of a waveform recorded by an earthquake detection station, which is required to be rapid and accurate. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to estimate magnitude integrated with deep learning, consisting of feature stage and regression stage. In the feature stage, we extract temporal & spatial features by deep learning methods, and combine them with hand-crafted features embedded expert domain knowledge. Then, each earthquake can be represented by a hybrid feature. Therefore, magnitude estimation can be modeled as a regression problem to solve. Our framework is evaluated on 5,503 earthquake records collected in Sichuan province, China. It is found that, learning the temporal & spatial features by deep neural networks is critical for magnitude estimation. The results demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance, compared with other approaches.
Sha Zhao, Yizhi Xu, Zhiling Luo, Jin Dong Song, Shijian Li, Gang Pan 0001
IJCNN1
2022 DeepOffense: a recurrent network based approach for crime prediction
Fangxun Zhou, Binbin Zhou 0005, Sha Zhao, Gang Pan 0001
CCF Trans. Pervasive Comput. Interact.3
2022 Dynamic road crime risk prediction with urban open data
Binbin Zhou 0005, Longbiao Chen, Fangxun Zhou, Shijian Li, Sha Zhao, Gang Pan 0001
Frontiers Comput. Sci.5
2022 Understanding Smartphone Users From Installed App Lists Using Boolean Matrix Factorization
abstract
Smartphones are changing humans' lifestyles. Mobile applications (apps) on smartphones serve as entries for users to access a wide range of services in our daily lives. The apps installed on one's smartphone convey lots of personal information, such as demographics, interests, and needs. This provides a new lens to understand smartphone users. However, it is difficult to compactly characterize a user with his/her installed app list. In this article, a user representation framework is proposed, where we model the underlying relations between apps and users with Boolean matrix factorization (BMF). It builds a compact user subspace by discovering basic components from installed app lists. Each basic component encapsulates a semantic interpretation of a series of special-purpose apps, which is a reflection of user needs and interests. Each user is represented by a linear combination of the semantic basic components. With this user representation framework, we use supervised and unsupervised learning methods to understand users, including mining user attributes, discovering user groups, and labeling semantic tags to users. Extensive experiments were conducted on three data subsets from a large-scale real-world dataset for evaluation, each consisting of installed app lists from over 10 000 users. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of our user representation framework.
Sha Zhao, Gang Pan 0001, Jianrong Tao, Zhiling Luo, Shijian Li, Zhaohui Wu 0001
IEEE Trans. Cybern.1
2022 A Fused Method of Machine Learning and Dynamic Time Warping for Road Anomalies Detection
abstract
To discover the condition of roads, a large number of detection algorithms have been proposed, most of which apply machine learning methods by time and frequency processing in acceleration and velocity data. However, few of them pay attention to the similarity of the data itself when the vehicle passes over the road anomalies. In this article, we propose a method to detect road anomalies by comparing the data windows with various length using Dynamic Time Warping(DTW) method. We propose a model to prove that the maximum acceleration of a vehicle passing through a road anomaly is linear with the height of the road barrier, and it’s verified by an experiment. This finding suggests that it is reasonable to divide the window by threshold detection. We also apply a brief random forest filter to roughly distinguish normal windows from anomaly windows using the aforementioned theory, in order to reduce the time consumption. From our study, a system is proposed that utilizes a series of acceleration data to discover where might be anomalies on the road, named as Quick Filter Based Dynamic Time Warping (QFB-DTW). We show that our method performs clearly beyond some existing methods. To support this conclusion, experiments are conducted based on three data sets and the results are statistically analyzed. We expect to lay the first step to some new thoughts to the field of road anomalies detection in subsequent work.
Zengwei Zheng, Mingxuan Zhou, Meimei Huo, Lin Sun 0006, Sha Zhao, Dan Chen 0002
IEEE Trans. Intell. Transp. Syst.6
2022 g-Inspector: Recurrent Attention Model on Graph
abstract
Graph classification problem is becoming one of research hotspots in the realm of graph mining, which has been widely used in cheminformatics, bioinformatics and social network analytics. Existing approaches, such as graph kernel methods and graph Convolutional Neural Network, are facing the challenges of non-interpretability and high dimensionality. To address the problems, we propose a novel recurrent attention model, called g-Inspector, which applies the attention mechanism to investigate the significance of each region to make the results interpretable. It also takes a shift operation to guide the inspector agent to discover the next relevant region, so that the model sequentially loads small regions instead of the entire large graph, to solve the high dimensionality problem. The experiments conducted on standard graph datasets show the effectiveness of our g-Inspector in graph classification problems.
Zhiling Luo, Yinghua Cui, Sha Zhao, Jianwei Yin
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.3
2021 Player Behavior Modeling for Enhancing Role-Playing Game Engagement
abstract
Role-playing games (RPGs) are one of the most exciting and most rapidly expanding genres of online games. Virtual characters that are not controlled by players, have become an integral part, which helps to advance narratives of RPGs. Believable characters can enhance game engagement and further improve player retention. However, game players easily find that most characters' behaviors are limited and improbable, resulting in a less meaningful game experience. In this work, we propose a framework to model game behaviors to learn behavior patterns of human players. Based on the learned behavior patterns, it generates human-like action sequences that can be used for the design of believable virtual characters in RPGs, so as to enhance game engagement. Specifically, considering the influence of game context in behavior patterns, we integrate game context (players' levels and game classes) with actions together to model behaviors. We propose a long-term memory cell on actions and game context to learn the hidden representations. We also introduce an attention mechanism to measure the contribution of the actions previously performed to the next action. Given only one action, our model can generate action sequences by predicting the succeeding action based on the previously generated actions. The model was evaluated on a real-world data set of over 22 000 players and more than 51 million action logs of an RPG game in 21 days. The results demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance.
Sha Zhao, Yizhi Xu, Zhiling Luo, Jianrong Tao, Shijian Li, Changjie Fan, Gang Pan 0001
IEEE Trans. Comput. Soc. Syst.1
2020 Gender Profiling From a Single Snapshot of Apps Installed on a Smartphone: An Empirical Study
abstract
The integration of the fifth generation (5G) networks and artificial intelligence (AI) benefits to create a more holistic and better connected ecosystem for industries. User profiling has become an important issue for industries to improve company profit. In the 5G era, smartphone applications have become an indispensable part in our everyday lives. Users determine what apps to install based on their personal needs, interests, and tastes, which is likely shaped by their genders-the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with their sex. It is possible to profile users' gender based simply on a single snapshot of apps installed on their smartphones. With this inference based on easy to access data, we can make smartphone systems more user-friendly, and provide better personalized products and services. In this article, we explore such possibilities through an empirical study on a large-scale dataset of installed app lists from 15 000 Android users. More specifically, we investigate the following research questions: 1) What differences between females and males can be explored from installed app lists? 2) Can user gender be reliably inferred from a snapshot of apps installed? Which snapshot feature(s) are the most predictive? What is the best combination of features for building the gender prediction model? 3) What are the limitations of a gender prediction model based solely on a snapshot of apps installed on a smartphone? We find significant gender differences in app type, function, and icon design. We then extract the corresponding features from a snapshot of apps installed to infer the gender of each user. We assess the gender predictive ability of individual features and combinations of different features. We achieve an accuracy of 76.62% and area under the curve of 84.23% with the best set of features, outperforming the existing work by around 5% and 10%, respectively. Finally, we perform an error analysis on misclassified users and discussed the implications and limitations of this article.
Sha Zhao, Yizhi Xu, Xiaojuan Ma, Ziwen Jiang, Zhiling Luo, Shijian Li, Laurence T. Yang, Anind K. Dey, Gang Pan 0001
IEEE Trans. Ind. Informatics1
2020 Forecasting Price Trend of Bulk Commodities Leveraging Cross-domain Open Data Fusion
abstract
Forecasting price trend of bulk commodities is important in international trade, not only for markets participants to schedule production and marketing plans but also for government administrators to adjust policies. Previous studies cannot support accurate fine-grained short-term prediction, since they mainly focus on coarse-grained long-term prediction using historical data. Recently, cross-domain open data provides possibilities to conduct fine-grained price forecasting, since they can be leveraged to extract various direct and indirect factors of the price. In this article, we predict the price trend over upcoming days, by leveraging cross-domain open data fusion. More specifically, we formulate the price trend into three classes (rise, slight-change, and fall), and then we predict the specific class in which the price trend of the future day lies. We take three factors into consideration: (1) supply factor considering sources providing bulk commodities,<?brk?> (2) demand factor focusing on vessel transportation with reflection of short time needs, and (3) expectation factor encompassing indirect features (e.g., air quality) with latent influences. A hybrid classification framework is proposed for the price trend forecasting. Evaluation conducted on nine real-world cross-domain open datasets shows that our framework can forecast the price trend accurately, outperforming multiple state-of-the-art baselines.
Binbin Zhou 0005, Sha Zhao, Longbiao Chen, Shijian Li, Zhaohui Wu 0001, Gang Pan 0001
ACM Trans. Intell. Syst. Technol.2
2019 GMTL: A GART Based Multi-task Learning Model for Multi-Social-Temporal Prediction in Online Games
abstract
Multi-social-temporal (MST) data, which represent multi-attributed time series corresponding to the entities in multi-relational social network series, are ubiquitous in real-world and virtual-world dynamic systems, such as online games. Predictions over MST data such as social time series prediction and temporal link weight prediction are of great importance but challenging. They are affected by many complex factors, including temporal characteristics, social characteristics, collaborative characteristics, task characteristics and the intrinsic causality between them. In this paper, we propose a graph attention recurrent network (GART) based multi-task learning model (GMTL) to fuse information across multiple social-temporal prediction tasks. Experiments on an MMORPG dataset demonstrate that GMTL outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines and can significantly improve performances of specific social-temporal prediction task with additional information from others. Our work has been deployed to several MMORPGs in practice and can also expand to many related multi-social-temporal prediction tasks in real-world applications. Case studies on applications for multi-social-temporal prediction show that GMTL produces great value in the actual business in NetEase Games.
Jianrong Tao, Linxia Gong, Changjie Fan, Longbiao Chen, Dezhi Ye, Sha Zhao
CIKM6
2019 Location Inference for Non-Geotagged Tweets in User Timelines [Extended Abstract]
abstract
This study explores the problem of inferring locations for individual tweets. We scrutinize Twitter user timelines in a novel fashion. First of all, we split each user's tweet timeline temporally into a number of clusters, each tending to imply a distinct location. Subsequently, we adapt machine learning models to our setting and design classifiers that classify each tweet cluster into one of the pre-defined location classes at the city level. Extensive experiments on a large set of real Twitter data suggest that our models are effective at inferring locations for non-geotagged tweets and outperform the state-of-the-art approaches significantly in terms of inference accuracy.
Pengfei Li 0005, Hua Lu 0001, Nattiya Kanhabua, Sha Zhao, Gang Pan 0001
ICDE4
2019 AppUsage2Vec: Modeling Smartphone App Usage for Prediction
abstract
App usage prediction, i.e. which apps will be used next, is very useful for smartphone system optimization, such as operating system resource management, battery energy consumption optimization, and user experience improvement as well. However, it is still challenging to achieve usage prediction of high accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for app usage prediction, called AppUsage2Vec, inspired by Doc2Vec. It models app usage records by considering the contribution of different apps, user personalized characteristics, and temporal context. We measure the contribution of each app to the target app by introducing an app-attention mechanism. The user personalized characteristics in app usage are learned by a module of dual-DNN. Furthermore, we encode the top-k supervised information in loss function for training the model to predict the app most likely to be used next. The AppUsage2Vec was evaluated on a dataset of 10,360 users and 46,434,380 records in three months. The results demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance.
Sha Zhao, Zhiling Luo, Ziwen Jiang, Shijian Li, Jianwei Yin, Gang Pan 0001
ICDE1
2019 MVAN: Multi-view Attention Networks for Real Money Trading Detection in Online Games
abstract
Online gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry that entertains a large, global population. However, one unfortunate phenomenon known as real money trading harms the competition and the fun. Real money trading is an interesting economic activity used to exchange assets in a virtual world with real world currencies, leading to imbalance of game economy and inequality of wealth and opportunity. Game operation teams have been devoting much efforts on real money trading detection, however, it still remains a challenging task. To overcome the limitation from traditional methods conducted by game operation teams, we propose, MVAN, the first multi-view attention networks for detecting real money trading with multi-view data sources. We present a multi-graph attention network (MGAT) in the graph structure view, a behavior attention network (BAN) in the vertex content view, a portrait attention network (PAN) in the vertex attribute view and a data source attention network (DSAN) in the data source view. Experiments conducted on real-world game logs from a commercial NetEase MMORPG( JusticePC) show that our method consistently performs promising results compared with other competitive methods over time and verifiy the importance and rationality of attention mechanisms. MVAN is deployed to several MMORPGs in NetEase in practice and achieving remarkable performance improvement and acceleration. Our method can easily generalize to other types of related tasks in real world, such as fraud detection, drug tracking and money laundering tracking etc.
Jianrong Tao, Jianshi Lin, Shize Zhang, Sha Zhao, Runze Wu 0001, Changjie Fan, Peng Cui 0001
KDD4
2019 Investigating smartphone user differences in their application usage behaviors: an empirical study
Sha Zhao, Yizhi Xu, Xiaojuan Ma, Zhiling Luo, Shijian Li, Anind K. Dey, Gang Pan 0001
CCF Trans. Pervasive Comput. Interact.1
2019 User profiling from their use of smartphone applications: A survey
Sha Zhao, Shijian Li, Julian Ramos 0001, Zhiling Luo, Ziwen Jiang, Anind K. Dey, Gang Pan 0001
Pervasive Mob. Comput.1
2019 Location Inference for Non-Geotagged Tweets in User Timelines
abstract
Social media like Twitter have become globally popular in the past decade. Thanks to the high penetration of smartphones, social media users are increasingly going mobile. This trend has contributed to foster various location based services deployed on social media, the success of which heavily depends on the availability and accuracy of users' location information. However, only a very small fraction of tweets in Twitter are geo-tagged. Therefore, it is necessary to infer locations for tweets in order to attain the purpose of those location based services. In this paper, we tackle this problem by scrutinizing Twitter user timelines in a novel fashion. First of all, we split each user's tweet timeline temporally into a number of clusters, each tending to imply a distinct location. Subsequently, we adapt two machine learning models to our setting and design classifiers that classify each tweet cluster into one of the pre-defined location classes at the city level. The Bayes based model focuses on the information gain of words with location implications in the user-generated contents. The convolutional LSTM model treats user-generated contents and their associated locations as sequences and employs bidirectional LSTM and convolution operation to make location inferences. The two models are evaluated on a large set of real Twitter data. The experimental results suggest that our models are effective at inferring locations for non-geotagged tweets and the models outperform the state-of-the-art and alternative approaches significantly in terms of inference accuracy.
Pengfei Li 0005, Hua Lu 0001, Nattiya Kanhabua, Sha Zhao, Gang Pan 0001
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.4
2016 Discovering different kinds of smartphone users through their application usage behaviors
abstract
Understanding smartphone users is fundamental for creating better smartphones, and improving the smartphone usage experience and generating generalizable and reproducible research. However, smartphone manufacturers and most of the mobile computing research community make a simplifying assumption that all smartphone users are similar or, at best, constitute a small number of user types, based on their behaviors. Manufacturers design phones for the broadest audience and hope they work for all users. Researchers mostly analyze data from smartphone-based user studies and report results without accounting for the many different groups of people that make up the user base of smartphones. In this work, we challenge these elementary characterizations of smartphone users and show evidence of the existence of a much more diverse set of users. We analyzed one month of application usage from 106,762 Android users and discovered 382 distinct types of users based on their application usage behaviors, using our own two-step clustering and feature ranking selection approach. Our results have profound implications on the reproducibility and reliability of mobile computing studies, design and development of applications, determination of which apps should be pre-installed on a smartphone and, in general, on the smartphone usage experience for different types of users.
Sha Zhao, Julian Ramos 0001, Jianrong Tao, Ziwen Jiang, Shijian Li, Zhaohui Wu 0001, Gang Pan 0001, Anind K. Dey
UbiComp1