Early Time Series Classification (ETSC) is critical in time-sensitive medical applications such as sepsis, yet it presents an inherent trade-off between accuracy and earliness. This tradeoff arises from two core challenges: 1) models should effectively model inherently weak and noisy early-stage snippets, and 2) they should resolve the complex, dual requirement of simultaneously capturing local, subject-specific variations and overarching global temporal patterns. Existing methods struggle to overcome these underlying challenges, often forcing a severe compromise: sacrificing accuracy to achieve earliness, or vice-versa. We propose DE3S, a Dual-Enhanced Soft-Sparse Sequence Learning framework, which systematically solves these challenges. A dual enhancement mechanism is proposed to enhance the modeling of weak, early signals. Then, an attention-based patch module is introduced to preserve discriminative information while reducing noise and complexity. A dual-path fusion architecture is designed, using a sparse mixture of experts to model local, subject-specific variations. A multi-scale inception module is also employed to capture global dependencies. Experiments on six real-world medical datasets show the competitive performance of DE3S, particularly in early prediction windows. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of each component in addressing its targeted challenge. The source code is available here.

Reward shaping is an effective technique for integrating domain knowledge into reinforcement learning (RL). However, traditional approaches like potential-based reward shaping totally rely on manually designing shaping reward functions, which significantly restricts exploration efficiency and introduces human cognitive biases. While a number of RL methods have been proposed to boost exploration by designing an intrinsic reward signal as exploration bonus. Nevertheless, these methods heavily rely on the count-based episodic term in their exploration bonus which falls short in scalability. To address these limitations, we propose a general end-to-end potential-based exploration bonus for deep RL via potentials of state discrepancy, which motivates the agent to discover novel states and provides them with denser rewards without manual intervention. Specifically, we measure the novelty of adjacent states by calculating their distance using the bisimulation metric-based potential function, which enhances agent's exploration and ensures policy invariance. In addition, we offer a theoretical guarantee on our inverse dynamic bisimulation metric, bounding the value difference and ensuring that the agent explores states with higher TD error, thus significantly improving training efficiency. The proposed approach is named \textbf{LIBERTY} (exp\textbf{L}oration v\textbf{I}a \textbf{B}isimulation m\textbf{E}t\textbf{R}ic-based s\textbf{T}ate discrepanc\textbf{Y}) which is comprehensively evaluated on the MuJoCo and the Arcade Learning Environments. Extensive experiments have verified the superiority and scalability of our algorithm compared with other competitive methods.

Existing distributed graph processing frameworks, e.g. , Pregel, Giraph, GPS and GraphLab, mainly exploit main memory to support flexible graph operations for efficiency. Due to the complexity of graph analytics, huge memory space is required especially for those graph analytics that spawn large intermediate results. Existing frameworks may terminate abnormally or degrade performance seriously when the memory is exhausted or the external storage has to be used. In this paper, we propose MOCgraph, a scalable distributed graph processing framework to reduce the memory footprint and improve the scalability, based on message online computing. MOCgraph consumes incoming messages in a streaming manner, so as to handle larger graphs or more complex analytics with the same memory capacity. MOCgraph also exploits message online computing with external storage to provide an efficient out-of-core support. We implement MOCgraph on top of Apache Giraph, and test it against several representative graph algorithms on large graph datasets. Experiments illustrate that MOCgraph is efficient and memory-saving, especially for graph analytics with large intermediate results.

Shenzhen Stock Market grows rapidly yet is still a young market when compared with Hong Kong, New York and London markets. Its daily turnover reaches billions US dollars. A good prediction of stock price will bring us substantial pecuniary reward. Technical analysis is a widely adopted financial prediction tool in worldwide stock markets. Candlestick pattern is one of the most efficient methods in technical analysis. However, does candlestick pattern prediction works for Shenzhen stocks? Candlestick patterns are always defined by fuzzy terms, could we have a quantitative definition of these patterns? We perform a quantitative study on these two major research problems in this paper. We study the morning star pattern in this work and the method in this paper could be extended to other patterns easily. So, we propose adopting the Radial Basis Function Neural Networks trained with Localized Generalization Error Model to predict whether or not the stock price will increase after the appearance of it. Then, we extract the patterns from the neural network to provide a quantitative definition of the morning star pattern for a particular stock. Experimental results show that our modification to the morning star pattern prediction prevents up to 69% of false prediction of the morning star pattern. We also provide a quantitative measure of the morning star patterns for two of the Shenzhen stocks.

The traditional information extraction tools have been developed for years. But, the accuracy of extraction is not very satisfactory, especially for named entity extraction. In this work, we analyze the reasons of it and propose a novel method to improve the accuracy. Existing methods extract information from a text which is collected from a single source. This is very difficult to extract the exact information we need. From the Internet, one could easily find tens of sources for the same information (e.g. particular news). In this work, we propose to combine information extracted from multiple sources using a majority voting to find the information we needed. We use Change of CEO as an example and we extract the new CEO, original CEO and the company name for the event. A off-the-shelf named entity extraction tool is adopted and our major contribution is the fusion of extraction results. Without our work, one finds single news provides many people and company names, such that we do not know who the new CEO is. By using our method, we provide the 2 CEO names and 1 company name. Experimental results show that our method has a high accuracy in finding the exact information.

Content-based image auto-annotation becomes a hot research topic owing to the development of image retrieval system and the storing technology of multimedia information. It is a key step in most of those image processing applications. In this work, we adopt active learning to image annotation for reducing the number of labeled images required for supervised learning procedure. Localized Generalization Error Model (L-GEM) based active learning uses localized generalization error bound as the sample selection criterion. In each turn, the most informative sample from a set of unlabeled samples is selected by the L-GEM based active learning will be labeled and added to the training dataset. A heuristic and a Q value selection improvement methods are introduced in this paper. The experimental results show that the proposed active learning efficiently reduces the number of labeled training samples. Moreover, the improvement method improve the performances in both testing accuracy and training time which are both essential in image annotation applications.

Owing to the growth of Internet and computer technology, pattern recognition for large-scale datasets has become one of the hot research topics. The major challenges are to reduce the human efforts involved and to improve the efficiency. Traditional passive learning methods require labeling of all training samples may not be feasible in large-scale recognition problems because of the requirement of large-scale class labeling for the huge number of training samples. In the literatures, there are many studies on active learning methods, which does not require all training samples to be labeled and it selects training samples for labeling based on the knowledge of the current classifier. In this paper, we present an active learning method using localized generalization error of candidate sample as selection criterion. Our method uses the generalization error of candidate sample, so theoretically it should have a better performance than other methods. From the experiment results, our method outperforms other methods in both yielding higher prediction accuracy on testing dataset and selecting fewer training samples. Furthermore, we propose a heuristics improvement based on the Q-neighborhood idea of the localized generalization error model to reduce the number of samples being selected and the computational time.