Solving complex visual tasks such as “Who invented the musical instrument on the right?” involves a composition of skills: understanding space, recognizing instruments, and also retrieving prior knowledge. Recent work shows promise by decomposing such tasks using a large language model (LLM) into an executable program that invokes specialized vision models. However, generated programs are error-prone: they omit necessary steps, include spurious ones, and are unable to recover when the specialized models give incor-rect outputs. Moreover, they require loading multiple models, incurring high latency and computation costs. We propose Visual Program Distillation (VPD), an instruction tuning framework that produces a vision-language model (VLM) ca-pable of solving complex visual tasks with a single forward pass. VPD distills the reasoning ability of LLMs by using them to sample multiple candidate programs, which are then executed and verified to identify a correct one. It translates each correct program into a language description of the reasoning steps, which are then distilled into a VLM. Exten-sive experiments show that VPD improves the VLM's ability to count, understand spatial relations, and reason compositionally. Our VPD-trained PaLI-X outperforms all prior VLMs, achieving state-of-the-art performance across complex vision tasks, including MMBench, OK-VQA, A-OKVQA, TallyQA, POPE, and Hateful Memes. An evaluation with human annotators also confirms that VPD improves model response factuality and consistency. Finally, experiments on content moderation demonstrate that VPD is also helpful for adaptation to real-world applications with limited data.

From content moderation to wildlife conservation, the number of applications that require models to recognize nuanced or subjective visual concepts is growing. Traditionally, developing classifiers for such concepts requires substantial manual effort measured in hours, days, or even months to identify and annotate data needed for training. Even with recently proposed Agile Modeling techniques, which enable rapid bootstrapping of image classifiers, users are still required to spend 30 minutes or more of monotonous, repetitive data labeling just to train a single classifier. Drawing on Fiske's Cognitive Miser theory, we propose a new framework that alleviates manual effort by replacing human labeling with natural language interactions, reducing the total effort required to define a concept by an order of magnitude: from labeling 2,000 images to only 100 plus some natural language interactions. Our framework leverages recent advances in foundation models, both large language models and vision-language models, to carve out the concept space through conversation and by automatically labeling training data points. Most importantly, our framework eliminates the need for crowd-sourced annotations. Moreover, our framework ultimately produces lightweight classification models that are deploy-able in cost-sensitive scenarios. Across 15 subjective concepts and across 2 public image classification datasets, our trained models outperform traditional Agile Modeling as well as state-of-the-art zero-shot classification models like ALIGN, CLIP, CuPL, and large visual question answering models like PaLI-X.

Large language models (LLMs) are powerful tools for content moderation, but their inference costs and latency make them prohibitive for casual use on large datasets, such as the Google Ads repository. This study proposes a method for scaling up LLM reviews for content moderation in Google Ads. First, we use heuristics to select candidates via filtering and duplicate removal, and create clusters of ads for which we select one representative ad per cluster. We then use LLMs to review only the representative ads. Finally, we propagate the LLM decisions for the representative ads back to their clusters. This method reduces the number of reviews by more than 3 orders of magnitude while achieving a 2x recall compared to a baseline non-LLM model. The success of this approach is a strong function of the representations used in clustering and label propagation; we found that cross-modal similarity representations yield better results than uni-modal representations.

The application of computer vision methods to nuanced, subjective concepts is growing. While crowdsourcing has served the vision community well for most objective tasks (such as labeling a "zebra"), it now falters on tasks where there is substantial subjectivity in the concept (such as identifying "gourmet tuna"). However, empowering any user to develop a classifier for their concept is technically difficult: users are neither machine learning experts nor have the patience to label thousands of examples. In reaction, we introduce the problem of Agile Modeling: the process of turning any subjective visual concept into a computer vision model through real-time user-in-the-loop interactions. We instantiate an Agile Modeling prototype for image classification and show through a user study (N=14) that users can create classifiers with minimal effort in under 30 minutes. We compare this user driven process with the traditional crowdsourcing paradigm and find that the crowd’s notion often differs from that of the user’s, especially as the concepts become more subjective. Finally, we scale our experiments with simulations of users training classifiers for ImageNet21k categories to further demonstrate the efficacy of the approach.

Automated content filtering and moderation is an important tool that allows online platforms to build striving user communities that facilitate cooperation and prevent abuse. Unfortunately, resourceful actors try to bypass automated filters in a bid to post content that violate platform policies and codes of conduct. To reach this goal, these malicious actors may obfuscate policy violating images (e.g., overlay harmful images by carefully selected benign images or visual patterns) to prevent machine learning models from reaching the correct decision. In this paper, we invite researchers to tackle this specific issue and present a new image benchmark. This benchmark, based on ImageNet, simulates the type of obfuscations created by malicious actors. It goes beyond Image-Net-C and ImageNet-C-bar by proposing general, drastic, adversarial modifications that preserve the original content intent. It aims to tackle a more common adversarial threat than the one considered by lp-norm bounded adversaries. We evaluate 33 pretrained models on the benchmark and train models with different augmentations, architectures and training methods on subsets of the obfuscations to measure generalization. Our hope is that this benchmark will encourage researchers to test their models and methods and try to find new approaches that are more robust to these obfuscations.

We present Neural Structured Learning (NSL) in TensorFlow [1], a new learning paradigm to train neural networks by leveraging structured signals in addition to feature inputs. Structure can be explicit as represented by a graph, or implicit, either induced by adversarial perturbation or inferred using techniques like embedding learning. NSL is open-sourced as part of the TensorFlow [2] ecosystem and is widely used in Google across many products and services. In this tutorial, we provide an overview of the NSL framework including various libraries, tools, and APIs as well as demonstrate the practical use of NSL in different applications. The NSL website is hosted at www.tensorflow.org/neural_structured_learning, which includes details about the theoretical foundations of the technology, extensive API documentation, and hands-on tutorials.

Named entity typing (NET) is a classification task of assigning an entity mention in the context with given semantic types.However, with the growing size and granularity of the entity types, few previous researches concern with newly emerged entity types.In this paper, we propose MZET, a novel memory augmented FNET (Fine-grained NET) model, to tackle the unseen types in a zero-shot manner.MZET incorporates character-level, word-level, and contextural-level information to learn the entity mention representation.Besides, MZET considers the semantic meaning and the hierarchical structure into the entity type representation.Finally, through the memory component which models the relationship between the entity mention and the entity type, MZET transfers the knowledge from seen entity types to the zero-shot ones.Extensive experiments on three public datasets show the superior performance obtained by MZET, which surpasses the state-of-the-art FNET neural network models with up to 8% gain in Micro-F1 and Macro-F1 score.

We present Neural Structured Learning (NSL) in TensorFlow [2], a new learning paradigm to train neural networks by leveraging structured signals in addition to feature inputs. Structure can be explicit as represented by a graph, or implicit, either induced by adversarial perturbation or inferred using techniques like embedding learning. NSL is open-sourced as part of the TensorFlow [3] ecosystem and is widely used in Google across many products and services. In this tutorial, we provide an overview of the NSL framework including various libraries, tools, and APIs as well as demonstrate the practical use of NSL in different applications. The NSL website is hosted at www.tensorflow.org/neural_structured_learning, which includes details about the theoretical foundations of the technology, extensive API documentation, and hands-on tutorials.

"How to learn image embeddings that capture fine-grained semantics based on the instance of an image?" "Is it possible for such embeddings to further understand image semantics closer to humans' perception?" In this paper, we present, Graph-Regularized Image Semantic Embedding (Graph-RISE), a web-scale neural graph learning framework deployed at Google, which allows us to train image embeddings to discriminate an unprecedented O(40M) ultra-fine-grained semantic labels. The proposed Graph-RISE outperforms state-of-the-art image embedding algorithms on several evaluation tasks, including kNN search and triplet ranking: the accuracy is improved by approximately 2X on the ImageNet dataset and by more than 5X on the iNaturalist dataset. Qualitatively, image retrieval from one billion images based on the proposed Graph-RISE effectively captures semantics and, compared to the state-of-the-art, differentiates nuances at levels that are closer to human-perception.

We propose a framework of Siamese community-preserving graph convolutional network (SCP-GCN) to learn the structural and functional joint embedding of brain networks. Specifically, we use graph convolutions to learn the structural and functional joint embedding, where the graph structure is defined with structural connectivity and node features are from the functional connectivity. Moreover, we propose to preserve the community structure of brain networks in the graph convolutions by considering the intra-community and inter-community properties in the learning process. Furthermore, we use Siamese architecture which models the pair-wise similarity learning to guide the learning process. To evaluate the proposed approach, we conduct extensive experiments on two real brain network datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach in structural and functional joint embedding for neurological disorder analysis, indicating its promising value for clinical applications.

Image classification models take image pixels as input and predict labels in a predefined taxonomy. While contextual information (e.g. text surrounding an image) can provide valuable orthogonal signals to improve classification, the typical setting in literature assumes the unavailability of text and thus focuses on models that rely purely on pixels. In this work, we also focus on the setting where only pixels are available in the input. However, we demonstrate that if we predict textual information from pixels, we can subsequently use the predicted text to train models that improve overall performance. We propose a framework that consists of two main components: (1) a phrase generator that maps image pixels to a contextual phrase, and (2) a multimodal model that uses textual features from the phrase generator and visual features from the image pixels to produce labels in the output taxonomy. The phrase generator is trained using web-based query-image pairs to incorporate contextual information associated with each image and has a large output space. We evaluate our framework on diverse benchmark datasets (specifically, the WebVision dataset for evaluating multi-class classification and OpenImages dataset for evaluating multi-label classification), demonstrating performance improvements over approaches based exclusively on pixels and showcasing benefits in prediction interpretability. We additionally present results to demonstrate that our framework provides improvements in few-shot learning of minimally labeled concepts. We further demonstrate the unique benefits of the multimodal nature of our framework by utilizing intermediate image/text co-embeddings to perform baseline zero-shot learning on the ImageNet dataset.

In this paper, we study the problem of modeling users' diverse interests. Previous methods usually learn a fixed user representation, which has a limited ability to represent distinct interests of a user. In order to model users' various interests, we propose a Memory Attention-aware Recommender System (MARS). MARS utilizes a memory component and a novel attentional mechanism to learn deep adaptive user representations. Trained in an end-to-end fashion, MARS adaptively summarizes users' interests. In the experiments, MARS outperforms seven state-of-the-art methods on three real-world datasets in terms of recall and mean average precision. We also demonstrate that MARS has a great interpretability to explain its recommendation results, which is important in many recommendation scenarios.

Exploiting historical data of users to make future predictions lives at the heart of building effective recommender systems (RS). Recent approaches for sequential recommendations often render past actions of a user into a sequence, seeking to capture the temporal dynamics in the sequence to predict the next item. However, the interests of users evolve over time together due to their mutual influence, and most of existing methods lack the ability to utilize the rich coevolutionary patterns available in underlying data represented by sequential graphs. In order to capture the co-evolving knowledge for sequential recommendations, we start from introducing an efficient spectral convolution operation to discover complex relationships between users and items from the spectral domain of a graph, where the hidden connectivity information of the graph can be revealed. Then, the spectral convolution is generalized into an recurrent method by utilizing gated mechanisms to model sequential graphs. Experimentally, we demonstrate the advantages of modeling co-evolving patterns, and Gated Spectral Units (GSUs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark datasets.

Existing recommendation methods mostly learn fixed vectors for users and items in a low-dimensional continuous space, and then calculate the popular dot-product to derive user-item distances. However, these methods suffer from two drawbacks: (1) the data sparsity issue prevents from learning high-quality representations; and (2) the dot-product violates the crucial triangular inequality and therefore, results in a sub-optimal performance. In this work, in order to overcome the two aforementioned drawbacks, we propose Deep Distribution Network (DDN) to model users and items via Gaussian distributions. We argue that, compared to fixed vectors, distribution-based representations are more powerful to characterize users' uncertain interests and items' distinct properties. In addition, we propose a Wasserstein-based loss, in which the critical triangular inequality can be satisfied. In experiments, we evaluate DDN and comparative models on standard datasets. It is shown that DDN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models, demonstrating the advantages of the proposed distribution-based representations and wassertein loss.

In many real-world applications, data are often unlabeled and comprised of different representations/views which often provide information complementary to each other. Although several multi-view clustering methods have been proposed, most of them routinely assume one weight for one view of features, and thus inter-view correlations are only considered at the view-level. These approaches, however, fail to explore the explicit correlations between features across multiple views. In this paper, we introduce a tensor-based approach to incorporate the higher-order interactions among multiple views as a tensor structure. Specifically, we propose a multi-linear multi-view clustering (MMC) method that can efficiently explore the full-order structural information among all views and reveal the underlying subspace structure embedded within the tensor. Extensive experiments on realworld datasets demonstrate that our proposed MMC algorithm clearly outperforms other related state-of-the-art methods.

Despite the popularity of Collaborative Filtering (CF), CF-based methods are haunted by the cold-start problem, which has a significantly negative impact on users' experiences with Recommender Systems (RS). In this paper, to overcome the aforementioned drawback, we first formulate the relationships between users and items as a bipartite graph. Then, we propose a new spectral convolution operation directly performing in the spectral domain, where not only the proximity information of a graph but also the connectivity information hidden in the graph are revealed. With the proposed spectral convolution operation, we build a deep recommendation model called Spectral Collaborative Filtering (SpectralCF). Benefiting from the rich information of connectivity existing in the spectral domain, SpectralCF is capable of discovering deep connections between users and items and therefore, alleviates the cold-start problem for CF. To the best of our knowledge, SpectralCF is the first CF-based method directly learning from the spectral domains of user-item bipartite graphs. We apply our method on several standard datasets. It is shown that SpectralCF significantly out-performs state-of-the-art models. Code and data are available at https://github.com/lzheng21/SpectralCF.

Real-world relations among entities can often be observed and determined by different perspectives/views. For example, the decision made by a user on whether to adopt an item relies on multiple aspects such as the contextual information of the decision, the item»s attributes, the user»s profile and the reviews given by other users. Different views may exhibit multi-way interactions among entities and provide complementary information. In this paper, we introduce a multi-tensor-based approach that can preserve the underlying structure of multi-view data in a generic predictive model. Specifically, we propose structural factorization machines (SFMs) that learn the common latent spaces shared by multi-view tensors and automatically adjust the importance of each view in the predictive model. Furthermore, the complexity of SFMs is linear in the number of parameters, which make SFMs suitable to large-scale problems. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed SFMs outperform several state-of-the-art methods in terms of prediction accuracy and computational cost.

The Internet has revolutionized healthcare by offering medical information ubiquitously to patients via the web search. The healthcare status, complex medical information needs of patients are expressed diversely and implicitly in their medical text queries. Aiming to better capture a focused picture of user's medical-related information search and shed insights on their healthcare information access strategies, it is challenging yet rewarding to detect structured user intentions from their diversely expressed medical text queries. We introduce a graph-based formulation to explore structured concept transitions for effective user intent detection in medical queries, where each node represents a medical concept mention and each directed edge indicates a medical concept transition. A deep model based on multi-task learning is introduced to extract structured semantic transitions from user queries, where the model extracts word-level medical concept mentions as well as sentence-level concept transitions collectively. A customized graph-based mutual transfer loss function is designed to impose explicit constraints and further exploit the contribution of mentioning a medical concept word to the implication of a semantic transition. We observe an 8% relative improvement in AUC and 23% relative reduction in coverage error by comparing the proposed model with the best baseline model for the concept transition inference task on real-world medical text queries.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) have been widely used to represent relationships among entities, while KGs cannot capture new relationships between entities emerging along time. Since news often provides the latest information regarding the new entities and relationships, there is an opportunity to connect emerging relationships from news timely. However, it is a challenging task due to the source heterogeneity of structured KGs and unstructured news texts. In order to address the issue, we propose a tensor-based framework to capture the complex interactions among multiple types of relations, entities and text descriptions. We further develop an efficient Text-Aware MUlti-RElational learning method (TAMURE) that can learn the embedding representations of entities and relation types from both KGs and news, by jointly factorizing the interaction parameters. Furthermore, the complexity of TAMURE is linear in the number of parameters, which makes it suitable to large-scale KGs and news texts. Extensive experiments via TensorFlow demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed TAMURE model compared with nine state-of-the-art methods on real-world datasets.

Multi-view clustering has become a widely studied problem in the area of unsupervised learning. It aims to integrate multiple views by taking advantages of the consensus and complimentary information from multiple views. Most of the existing works in multi-view clustering utilize the vector-based representation for features in each view. However, in many real-world applications, instances are represented by graphs, where those vector-based models cannot fully capture the structure of the graphs from each view. To solve this problem, in this paper we propose a Multi-view Clustering framework on graph instances with Graph Embedding (MCGE). Specifically, we model the multi-view graph data as tensors and apply tensor factorization to learn the multi-view graph embeddings, thereby capturing the local structure of graphs. We build an iterative framework by incorporating multi-view graph embedding into the multi-view clustering task on graph instances, jointly performing multi-view clustering and multi-view graph embedding simultaneously. The multi-view clustering results are used for refining the multi-view graph embedding, and the updated multi-view graph embedding results further improve the multi-view clustering. Extensive experiments on two real brain network datasets (i.e., HIV and Bipolar) demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed MCGE approach in multi-view connectome analysis for clinical investigation and application.

Owing to prominence as a diagnostic tool for probing the neural correlates of cognition, neuroimaging tensor data has been the focus of intense investigation. Although many supervised tensor learning approaches have been proposed, they either cannot capture the nonlinear relationships of tensor data or cannot preserve the complex multi-way structural information. In this paper, we propose a Multi-way Multi-level Kernel (MMK) model that can extract discriminative, nonlinear and structural preserving representations of tensor data. Specifically, we introduce a kernelized CP tensor factorization technique, which is equivalent to performing the low-rank tensor factorization in a possibly much higher dimensional space that is implicitly defined by the kernel function. We further employ a multi-way nonlinear feature mapping to derive the dual structural preserving kernels, which are used in conjunction with kernel machines (e.g., SVM). Extensive experiments on real-world neuroimages demonstrate that the proposed MMK method can effectively boost the classification performance on diverse brain disorders (i.e., Alzheimers disease, ADHD, and HIV).

With the rapid development of mobile apps, the availability of a large number of mobile apps in application stores brings challenges to locate appropriate apps for users. Providing accurate mobile app recommendation for users becomes an imperative task. Conventional approaches mainly focus on learning users' preferences and app features to predict the user-app ratings. However, most of them did not consider the interactions among the context information of apps. To address this issue, we propose a broad learning approach for Context-Aware app recommendation with Tensor Analysis (CATA). Specifically, we utilize a tensor-based framework to effectively integrate app category information and multi-view features on users and apps, respectively, to facilitate the performance of rating prediction. The multidimensional structure is employed to capture the hidden relationships among the app categories and the multiview features. We develop an efficient factorization method which applies Tucker decomposition to learn the full-order interactions among the app categories and features. Furthermore, we employ a group ℓ1-norm regularization to learn the group-wise feature importance of each view with respect to each app category. Experiments on a real-world mobile app dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Multi-view graph embedding and hub detection have both become widely studied problems in the area of graph learning. Both graph embedding and hub detection relate to the node clustering structure of graphs. The multi-view graph embedding usually implies the node clustering structure of the graph based on the multiple views, while hubs are the boundary-spanning nodes across different node clusters in the graph and thus may potentially influence the clustering structure of the graph. However, none of the existing works considered joint learning the multi-view embeddings and the hubs from multi-view graph data. In this paper, we propose to incorporate the hub detection task into the multi-view graph embedding framework so that the two tasks could benefit from each other. Specifically, we propose an auto-weighted framework of Multi-view Graph Embedding with Hub Detection (MVGE-HD) for brain network analysis. The MVGE-HD framework learns a unified graph embedding across all the views while reducing the potential influence of the hubs on blurring the boundaries between node clusters in the graph, thus leading to a clear and discriminative node clustering structure for the graph. We apply MVGE-HD on two real multi-view brain network datasets (i.e., HIV and Bipolar). The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed framework in brain network analysis for clinical investigation and application.

In the context of supervised tensor learning, preserving the structural information and exploiting the discriminative nonlinear relationships of tensor data are crucial for improving the performance of learning tasks. Based on tensor factorization theory and kernel methods, we propose a novel Kernelized Support Tensor Machine (KSTM) which integrates kernelized tensor factorization with maximum-margin criterion. Specifically, the kernelized factorization technique is introduced to approximate the tensor data in kernel space such that the complex nonlinear relationships within tensor data can be explored. Further, dual structural preserving kernels are devised to learn the nonlinear boundary between tensor data. As a result of joint optimization, the kernels obtained in KSTM exhibit better generalization power to discriminative analysis. The experimental results on real-world neuroimaging datasets show the superiority of KSTM over the state-of-the-art techniques.

Mining from neuroimaging data is becoming increasingly popular in the field of healthcare and bioinformatics, due to its potential to discover clinically meaningful structure patterns that could facilitate the understanding and diagnosis of neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. Most recent research concentrates on applying subgraph mining techniques to discover connected subgraph patterns in the brain network. However, the underlying brain network structure is complicated. As a shallow linear model, subgraph mining cannot capture the highly non-linear structures, resulting in sub-optimal patterns. Therefore, how to learn representations that can capture the highly non-linearity of brain networks and preserve the underlying structures is a critical problem.

Many real-world problems, such as web image analysis, document categorization and product recommendation, often exhibit dual-heterogeneity: heterogeneous features obtained in multiple views, and multiple tasks might be related to each other through one or more shared views. To address these Multi-Task Multi-View (MTMV) problems, we propose a tensor-based framework for learning the predictive multilinear structure from the full-order feature interactions within the heterogeneous data. The usage of tensor structure is to strengthen and capture the complex relationships between multiple tasks with multiple views. We further develop efficient multilinear factorization machines (MFMs) that can learn the task-specific feature map and the task-view shared multilinear structures, without physically building the tensor. In the proposed method, a joint factorization is applied to the full-order interactions such that the consensus representation can be learned. In this manner, it can deal with the partially incomplete data without difficulty as the learning procedure does not simply rely on any particular view. Furthermore, the complexity of MFMs is linear in the number of parameters, which makes MFMs suitable to large-scale real-world problems. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in a wide variety of MTMV problems.

In this paper, we propose an online multi-view clustering algorithm, OMVC, which deals with large-scale incomplete views. We model the multi-view clustering problem as a joint weighted NMF problem and process the multi-view data chunk by chunk to reduce the memory requirement. OMVC learns the latent feature matrices for all the views and pushes them towards a consensus. We further increase the robustness of the learned latent feature matrices in OMVC via lasso regularization. To minimize the influence of incompleteness, dynamic weight setting is introduced to give lower weights to the incoming missing instances in different views. More importantly, to reduce the computational time, we incorporate a faster projected gradient descent by utilizing the Hessian matrices in OMVC. Extensive experiments conducted on four real data demonstrate the effectiveness of OMVC.

Community detection has been an important task for social and information networks. Existing approaches usually assume the completeness of linkage and content information. However, the links and node attributes can usually be partially observable in many real-world networks. For example, users can specify their privacy settings to prevent non-friends from viewing their posts or connections. Such incompleteness poses additional challenges to community detection algorithms. In this paper, we aim to detect communities with partially observable link structure and node attributes. To fuse such incomplete information, we learn link-based and attribute-based representations via kernel alignment and a co-regularization approach is proposed to combine the information from both sources (i.e., links and attributes). The link-based and attribute-based representations can lend strength to each other via the partial consensus learning. We present two instantiations of this framework by enforcing hard and soft consensus constraint respectively. Experimental results on real-world datasets show the superiority of the proposed approaches over the baseline methods and its robustness under different observable levels.

Millions of ratings and reviews on online review websites are influential over business revenues and customer experiences. However, spammers are posting fake reviews in order to gain financial benefits, at the cost of harming honest businesses and customers. Such fake reviews can be illegal and it is important to detect spamming attacks to eliminate unjust ratings and reviews. However, most of the current approaches can be incompetent as they can only utilize data from individual websites independently, or fail to detect more subtle attacks even they can fuse data from multiple sources. Further, the revealed evidence fails to explain the more complicated real world spamming attacks, hindering the detection processes that usually have human experts in the loop. We close this gap by introducing a novel framework that can jointly detect and explain the potential attacks. The framework mines both macroscopic level temporal sentimental patterns and microscopic level features from multiple review websites. We construct multiple sentimental time series to detect atomic dynamics, based on which we mine various cross-site sentimental temporal patterns that can explain various attacking scenarios. To further identify individual spams within the attacks with more evidence, we study and identify effective microscopic textual and behavioral features that are indicative of spams. We demonstrate via human annotations, that the simple and effective framework can spot a sizable collection of spams that have bypassed one of the current commercial anti-spam systems.

Real-world knowledge is growing rapidly nowadays. New entities arise with time, resulting in large volumes of relations that do not exist in current knowledge graphs (KGs). These relations containing at least one new entity are called emerging relations. They often appear in news, and hence the latest information about new entities and relations can be learned from news timely. In this paper, we focus on the problem of discovering emerging relations from news. However, there are several challenges for this task: (1) at the beginning, there is little information for emerging relations, causing problems for traditional sentence-based models; (2) no negative relations exist in KGs, creating difficulties in utilizing only positive cases for emerging relation detection from news; and (3) new relations emerge rapidly, making it necessary to keep KGs up to date with the latest emerging relations. In order to address these issues, we start from a global graph perspective and propose a novel Heterogeneous graph Embedding framework for Emerging Relation detection (HEER) that learns a classifier from positive and unlabeled instances by utilizing information from both news and KGs. Furthermore, we implement HEER in an incremental manner to timely update KGs with the latest detected emerging relations. Extensive experiments on real-world news datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed HEER model.

In this paper, we propose an Online unsupervised Multi-View Feature Selection method, OMVFS, which deals with large-scale/streaming multi-view data in an online fashion. OMVFS embeds unsupervised feature selection into a clustering algorithm via nonnegative matrix factorization with sparse learning. It further incorporates the graph regularization to preserve the local structure information and help select discriminative features. Instead of storing all the historical data, OMVFS processes the multi-view data chunk by chunk and aggregates all the necessary information into several small matrices. By using the buffering technique, the proposed OMVFS can reduce the computational and storage cost while taking advantage of the structure information. Furthermore, OMVFS can capture the concept drifts in the data streams. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed OMVFS method. More importantly, OMVFS is about 100 times faster than the off-line methods.

Detecting communities (or modular structures) and structural hole spanners, the nodes bridging different communities in a network, are two essential tasks in the realm of network analytics. Due to the topological nature of communities and structural hole spanners, these two tasks are naturally tangled with each other, while there has been little synergy between them. In this paper, we propose a novel harmonic modularity method to tackle both tasks simultaneously. Specifically, we apply a harmonic function to measure the smoothness of community structure and to obtain the community indicator. We then investigate the sparsity level of the interactions between communities, with particular emphasis on the nodes connecting to multiple communities, to discriminate the indicator of SH spanners and assist the community guidance. Extensive experiments on real-world networks demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in the community detection task and also in the SH spanner identification task (even the methods that require the supervised community information). Furthermore, by removing the SH spanners spotted by our method, we show that the quality of other community detection methods can be further improved.

Owing to prominence as a research and diagnostic tool in human brain mapping, whole-brain fMRI image analysis has been the focus of intense investigation. Conventionally, input fMRI brain images are converted into vectors or matrices and adapted in kernel based classifiers. fMRI data, however, are inherently coupled with sophisticated spatio-temporal tensor structure (i.e., 3D space × time). Valuable structural information will be lost if the tensors are converted into vectors. Furthermore, time series fMRI data are noisy, involving time shift and low temporal resolution. To address these analytic challenges, more compact and discriminative representations for kernel modeling are needed. In this paper, we propose a novel spatio-temporal tensor kernel (STTK) approach for whole-brain fMRI image analysis. Specifically, we design a volumetric time series extraction approach to model the temporal data, and propose a spatio-temporal tensor based factorization for feature extraction. We further leverage the tensor structure to encode prior knowledge in the kernel. Extensive experiments using real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach effectively boosts the fMRI classification performance in diverse brain disorders (i.e., Alzheimer's disease, ADHD and HIV).

There is considerable interest in mining neuroimage data to discover clinically meaningful connectivity patterns to inform an understanding of neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. Subgraph mining models have been used to discover connected subgraph patterns. However, it is difficult to capture the complicated interplay among patterns. As a result, classification performance based on these results may not be satisfactory. To address this issue, we propose to learn non-linear representations of brain connectivity patterns from deep learning architectures. This is non-trivial, due to the limited subjects and the high costs of acquiring the data. Fortunately, auxiliary information from multiple side views such as clinical, serologic, immunologic, cognitive and other diagnostic testing also characterizes the states of subjects from different perspectives. In this paper, we present a novel Multi-side-View guided AutoEncoder (MVAE) that incorporates multiple side views into the process of deep learning to tackle the bias in the construction of connectivity patterns caused by the scarce clinical data. Extensive experiments show that MVAE not only captures discriminative connectivity patterns for classification, but also discovers meaningful information for clinical interpretation.

Personal social networks are considered as one of the most influential sources in shaping a customer's attitudes and behaviors. However, the interactions with friends or colleagues in social networks of individual customers are barely observable in most e-commerce companies. In this paper, we study the problem of customer identification in social networks, i.e., connecting customer accounts at e-commerce sites to the corresponding user accounts in online social networks such as Twitter. Identifying customers in social networks is a crucial prerequisite for many potential marketing applications. These applications, for example, include personalized product recommendation based on social correlations, discovering community of customers, and maximizing product adoption and profits over social networks.

Crowdfunding -- in which people can raise funds through collaborative contributions of general public (i.e., crowd) -- has emerged as a billion dollars business for supporting more than one million ventures. However, very few research works have examined the process of crowdfunding. In particular, none has studied how social networks help crowdfunding projects to succeed. To gain insights into the effects of social networks in crowdfunding, we analyze the hidden connections between the fundraising results of projects on crowdfunding websites and the corresponding promotion campaigns in social media. Our analysis considers the dynamics of crowdfunding from two aspects: how fundraising activities and promotional activities on social media simultaneously evolve over time, and how the promotion campaigns influence the final outcomes. From our investigation, we identify a number of important principles that provide a useful guide for devising effective campaigns. For example, we observe temporal distribution of customer interest, strong correlations between a crowdfunding project's early promotional activities and the final outcomes, and the importance of concurrent promotion from multiple sources. We then show that these discoveries can help predict several important quantities, including overall popularity and the success rate of the project. Finally, we show how to use these discoveries to help design crowdfunding sites.