DHCP is widely deployed in WLANs to automatically assign IP addresses to WiFi devices when users connect to the WLANs. However, frequent user mobility brings big challenges to the DHCP performance. Recently proposed IP configuration (e.g., IP lease time, size of IP address pool) decisions on DHCP are based on traditional models to study user mobility patterns which lead to poor DHCP performance since the online time of individuals varies due to their personal pReferences and the number of crowds differs spatially and temporally. In this paper, we propose PredHCP, a predictive configuration framework on DHCP to improve the DHCP performance. Specifically, PredHCP utilizes an attention-based recurrent neural network (ARNN) to learn sequential patterns of individual mobility and accurately predicts user online time to ensure the effective IP lease time configuration. Meanwhile, PredHCP introduces a spatio-temporal graph neural network (STGNN) to learn both spatial and temporal dependencies of crowd migration and accurately predict crowd size in each area to ensure effective IP pool configuration. We conduct comprehensive experiments on real network traces for a month to evaluate the performance of PredHCP. Experimental results show that PredHCP can accurately predict user mobility patterns by achieving lower prediction errors. By accurately modeling mobility patterns, PredHCP makes effective IP configuration to ensure high DHCP performance. Large-scale simulation results show that PredHCP can save up to 69% IP addresses and the IP efficiency is 41% which outperforms existing methods by 6%.

We propose a causal hidden Markov model to achieve robust prediction of irreversible disease at an early stage, which is safety-critical and vital for medical treatment in early stages. Specifically, we introduce the hidden variables which propagate to generate medical data at each time step. To avoid learning spurious correlation (e.g., confounding bias), we explicitly separate these hidden variables into three parts: a) the disease (clinical)-related part; b) the disease (non-clinical)-related part; c) others, with only a),b) causally related to the disease however c) may contain spurious correlations (with the disease) inherited from the data provided. With personal attributes and disease label respectively provided as side information and supervision, we prove that these disease-related hidden variables can be disentangled from others, implying the avoidance of spurious correlation for generalization to medical data from other (out-of-) distributions. Guaranteed by this result, we propose a sequential variational auto-encoder with a reformulated objective function. We apply our model to the early prediction of peripapillary atrophy and achieve promising results on out-of-distribution test data. Further, the ablation study empirically shows the effectiveness of each component in our method. And the visualization shows the accurate identification of lesion regions from others.1

Forecasting Parapapillary atrophy (PPA), i.e., a symptom related to most irreversible eye diseases, provides an alarm for implementing an intervention to slow down the disease progression at early stage. A key question for this forecast is: how to fully utilize the historical data (e.g., retinal image) up to the current stage for future disease prediction? In this paper, we provide an answer with a novel framework, namely Disease Forecast via Progression Learning (DFPL), which exploits the irreversibility prior (i.e., cannot be reversed once diagnosed). Specifically, based on this prior, we decompose two factors that contribute to the prediction of the future disease: i) the current disease label given the data (retinal image, clinical attributes) at present and ii) the future disease label given the progression of the retinal images that from the current to the future. To model these two factors, we introduce the current and progression predictors in DFPL, respectively. In order to account for the degree of progression of the disease, we propose a temporal generative model to accurately generate the future image and compare it with the current one to get a residual image. The generative model is implemented by a recurrent neural network, in order to exploit the dependency of the historical data. To verify our approach, we apply it to a PPA in-house dataset and it yields a significant improvement (e.g., 4.48% of accuracy; 3.45% of AUC) over others. Besides, our generative model can accurately localize the disease-related regions.

Distributional shifts between training and target domains may degrade the prediction accuracy of learned models, mainly because these models often learn features that possess only correlation rather than causal relation with the output. Such a correlation, which is known as ``spurious correlation'' statistically, is domain-dependent hence may fail to generalize to unseen domains. To avoid such a spurious correlation, we propose \textbf{La}tent \textbf{C}ausal \textbf{I}nvariance \textbf{M}odels (LaCIM) that specifies the underlying causal structure of the data and the source of distributional shifts, guiding us to pursue only causal factor for prediction. Specifically, the LaCIM introduces a pair of correlated latent factors: (a) causal factor and (b) others, while the extent of this correlation is governed by a domain variable that characterizes the distributional shifts. On the basis of this, we prove that the distribution of observed variables conditioning on latent variables is shift-invariant. Equipped with such an invariance, we prove that the causal factor can be recovered without mixing information from others, which induces the ground-truth predicting mechanism. We propose a Variational-Bayesian-based method to learn this invariance for prediction. The utility of our approach is verified by improved generalization to distributional shifts on various real-world data. Our code is freely available at \url{https://github.com/wubotong/LaCIM}.

In image-based disease prediction, it can be hard to give certain cases a deterministic “disease/normal” label due to lack of enough information, e.g., at its early stage. We call such cases “unsure” data. Labeling such data as unsure suggests follow-up examinations so as to avoid irreversible medical accident/loss in contrast to incautious prediction. This is a common practice in clinical diagnosis, however, mostly neglected by existing methods. Learning with unsure data also inter-weaves with two other practical issues: (i) data imbalance issue that may incur model-bias towards the majority class, and (ii) conservative/aggressive strategy consideration, i.e., the negative (normal) samples and positive (disease) samples should NOT be treated equally - the former should be detected with a high precision (conservativeness) and the latter should be detected with a high recall (aggression) to avoid missing opportunity for treatment. Mixed with these issues, learning with unsure data becomes particularly challenging. In this paper, we raise “learning with unsure data” problem and formulate it as an ordinal regression and propose a unified end-to-end learning framework, which also considers the aforementioned two issues: (i) incorporate cost-sensitive parameters to alleviate the data imbalance problem, and (ii) execute the conservative and aggressive strategies by introducing two parameters in the training procedure. The benefits of learning with unsure data and validity of our models are demonstrated on the prediction of Alzheimer's Disease and lung nodules.

Existing person re-identification (re-id) methods typically assume that: 1) any probe person is guaranteed to appear in the gallery target population during deployment (i.e., closed-world) and 2) the probe set contains only a limited number of people (i.e., small search scale). Both assumptions are artificial and breached in real-world applications, since the probe population in target people search can be extremely vast in practice due to the ambiguity of probe search space boundary. Therefore, it is unrealistic that any probe person is assumed as one target people, and a large-scale search in person images is inherently demanded. In this paper, we introduce a new person re-id search setting, called large scale open-world (LSOW) re-id, characterized by huge size probe images and open person population in search thus more close to practical deployments. Under LSOW, the under-studied problem of person re-id efficiency is essential in addition to that of commonly studied re-id accuracy. We, therefore, develop a novel fast person re-id method, called Cross-view Identity Correlation and vErification (X-ICE) hashing, for joint learning of cross-view identity representation binarisation and discrimination in a unified manner. Extensive comparative experiments on three large-scale benchmarks have been conducted to validate the superiority and advantages of the proposed X-ICE method over a wide range of the state-of-the-art hashing models, person re-id methods, and their combinations.

In the literature of cross-modal search, most methods employ linear models to pursue hash codes that preserve data similarity, in terms of Euclidean distance, both within-modal and across-modal. However, data dimensionality can be quite different across modalities. It is known that the behavior of Euclidean distance/similarity between datapoints can be drastically different in linear spaces of different dimensionality. In this paper, we identify this "variation of dimensionality" problem in cross-modal search that may harm most of distance-based methods. We propose a semi-supervised nonlinear probabilistic cross-modal hashing method, namely Neighborhood-Preserving Hashing (NPH), to alleviate the negative effect due to the variation of dimensionality issue. Inspired by tSNE \cite{tSNE_van2008visualizing}, rather than preserve pairwise data distances, we propose to learn hash codes that preserve neighborhood relationship of datapoints via matching their conditional distribution derived from distance to that of datapoints of multi-modalities. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art distance-based semi-supervised cross-modal hashing methods as well as many fully-supervised ones.