Event Causality Identification (ECI) aims to detect whether there exists a causal relation between two events in a document. Existing studies adopt a kind of identifying after learning paradigm, where events' representations are first learned and then used for the identification. Furthermore, they mainly focus on the causality existence, but ignoring causal direction. In this paper, we take care of the causal direction and propose a new identifying while learning mode for the ECI task. We argue that a few causal relations can be easily identified with high confidence, and the directionality and structure of these identified causalities can be utilized to update events' representations for boosting next round of causality identification. To this end, this paper designs an *iterative learning and identifying framework*: In each iteration, we construct an event causality graph, on which events' causal structure representations are updated for boosting causal identification. Experiments on two public datasets show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in both evaluations for causality existence identification and direction identification.
Multifaceted ideology detection (MID) aims to detect the ideological leanings of texts towards multiple facets. Previous studies on ideology detection mainly focus on one generic facet and ignore label semantics and explanatory descriptions of ideologies, which are a kind of instructive information and reveal the specific concepts of ideologies. In this paper, we develop a novel concept semantics-enhanced framework for the MID task. Specifically, we propose a bidirectional iterative concept flow (BICo) method to encode multifaceted ideologies. BICo enables the concepts to flow across levels of the schema tree and enriches concept representations with multi-granularity semantics. Furthermore, we explore concept attentive matching and concept-guided contrastive learning strategies to guide the model to capture ideology features with the learned concept semantics. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in MID, including in the cross-topic scenario.
Event Causality Identification (ECI) aims at determining the existence of a causal relation between two events. Although recent prompt learning-based approaches have shown promising improvements on the ECI task, their performance are often subject to the delicate design of multiple prompts and the positive correlations between the main task and derivate tasks. The in-context learning paradigm provides explicit guidance for label prediction in the prompt learning paradigm, alleviating its reliance on complex prompts and derivative tasks. However, it does not distinguish between positive and negative demonstrations for analogy learning. Motivated from such considerations, this paper proposes an In-Context Contrastive Learning (ICCL) model that utilizes contrastive learning to enhance the effectiveness of both positive and negative demonstrations. Additionally, we apply contrastive learning to event pairs to better facilitate event causality identification. Our ICCL is evaluated on the widely used corpora, including the EventStoryLine and Causal-TimeBank, and results show significant performance improvements over the state-of-the-art algorithms.
Millimetre wave (mmWave) radar is a non-intrusive privacy and relatively convenient and inexpensive device, which has been demonstrated to be applicable in place of RGB cameras in human indoor pose estimation tasks. However, mmWave radar relies on the collection of reflected signals from the target, and the radar signals containing information is difficult to be fully applied. This has been a long-standing hindrance to the improvement of pose estimation accuracy. To address this major challenge, this paper introduces a probability map guided multi-format feature fusion model, ProbRadarM3F. This is a novel radar feature extraction framework using a traditional FFT method in parallel with a probability map based positional encoding method. ProbRadarM3F fuses the traditional heatmap features and the positional features, then effectively achieves the estimation of 14 keypoints of the human body. Experimental evaluation on the HuPR dataset proves the effectiveness of the model proposed in this paper, outperforming other methods experimented on this dataset with an AP of 69.9 %. The emphasis of our study is focusing on the position information that is not exploited before in radar singal. This provides direction to investigate other potential non-redundant information from mmWave rader.
Recent advancements in machine learning and deep learning have brought algorithmic fairness into sharp focus, illuminating concerns over discriminatory decision making that negatively impacts certain individuals or groups. These concerns have manifested in legal, ethical, and societal challenges, including the erosion of trust in intelligent systems. In response, this survey delves into the existing literature on algorithmic fairness, specifically highlighting its multifaceted social consequences. We introduce a novel taxonomy based on 'tolerance', a term we define as the degree to which variations in fairness outcomes are acceptable, providing a structured approach to understanding the subtleties of fairness within algorithmic decisions. Our systematic review covers diverse industries, revealing critical insights into the balance between algorithmic decision making and social equity. By synthesizing these insights, we outline a series of emerging challenges and propose strategic directions for future research and policy making, with the goal of advancing the field towards more equitable algorithmic systems.
Pedestrian trajectory prediction is the key technology in many applications for providing insights into human behavior and anticipating human future motions. Most existing empirical models are explicitly formulated by observed human behaviors using explicable mathematical terms with a deterministic nature, while recent work has focused on developing hybrid models combined with learning-based techniques for powerful expressiveness while maintaining explainability. However, the deterministic nature of the learned steering behaviors from the empirical models limits the models' practical performance. To address this issue, this work proposes the social conditional variational autoencoder (SocialCVAE) for predicting pedestrian trajectories, which employs a CVAE to explore behavioral uncertainty in human motion decisions. SocialCVAE learns socially reasonable motion randomness by utilizing a socially explainable interaction energy map as the CVAE's condition, which illustrates the future occupancy of each pedestrian's local neighborhood area. The energy map is generated using an energy-based interaction model, which anticipates the energy cost (i.e., repulsion intensity) of pedestrians' interactions with neighbors. Experimental results on two public benchmarks including 25 scenes demonstrate that SocialCVAE significantly improves prediction accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art methods, with up to 16.85% improvement in Average Displacement Error (ADE) and 69.18% improvement in Final Displacement Error (FDE).
The fusion of vision and language has brought about a transformative shift in computer vision through the emergence of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, the resource-intensive nature of existing VLMs poses a significant challenge. We need an accessible method for developing the next generation of VLMs. To address this issue, we propose Zoom-shot, a novel method for transferring the zero-shot capabilities of CLIP to any pre-trained vision encoder. We do this by exploiting the multimodal information (i.e. text and image) present in the CLIP latent space through the use of specifically designed multimodal loss functions. These loss functions are (1) cycle-consistency loss and (2) our novel prompt-guided knowledge distillation loss (PG-KD). PG-KD combines the concept of knowledge distillation with CLIP's zero-shot classification, to capture the interactions between text and image features. With our multimodal losses, we train a $\textbf{linear mapping}$ between the CLIP latent space and the latent space of a pre-trained vision encoder, for only a $\textbf{single epoch}$. Furthermore, Zoom-shot is entirely unsupervised and is trained using $\textbf{unpaired}$ data. We test the zero-shot capabilities of a range of vision encoders augmented as new VLMs, on coarse and fine-grained classification datasets, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art in this problem domain. In our ablations, we find Zoom-shot allows for a trade-off between data and compute during training; and our state-of-the-art results can be obtained by reducing training from 20% to 1% of the ImageNet training data with 20 epochs. All code and models are available on GitHub.
The detection of anomalies in multivariate time series data is crucial for various practical applications, including smart power grids, traffic flow forecasting, and industrial process control. However, real-world time series data is usually not well-structured, posting significant challenges to existing approaches: (1) The existence of missing values in multivariate time series data along variable and time dimensions hinders the effective modeling of interwoven spatial and temporal dependencies, resulting in important patterns being overlooked during model training; (2) Anomaly scoring with irregularly-sampled observations is less explored, making it difficult to use existing detectors for multivariate series without fully-observed values. In this work, we introduce a novel framework called GST-Pro, which utilizes a graph spatiotemporal process and anomaly scorer to tackle the aforementioned challenges in detecting anomalies on irregularly-sampled multivariate time series. Our approach comprises two main components. First, we propose a graph spatiotemporal process based on neural controlled differential equations. This process enables effective modeling of multivariate time series from both spatial and temporal perspectives, even when the data contains missing values. Second, we present a novel distribution-based anomaly scoring mechanism that alleviates the reliance on complete uniform observations. By analyzing the predictions of the graph spatiotemporal process, our approach allows anomalies to be easily detected. Our experimental results show that the GST-Pro method can effectively detect anomalies in time series data and outperforms state-of-the-art methods, regardless of whether there are missing values present in the data. Our code is available: https://github.com/huankoh/GST-Pro.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been clearly established as a technology with the potential to revolutionize fields from healthcare to finance - if developed and deployed responsibly. This is the topic of responsible AI, which emphasizes the need to develop trustworthy AI systems that minimize bias, protect privacy, support security, and enhance transparency and accountability. Explainable AI (XAI) has been broadly considered as a building block for responsible AI (RAI), with most of the literature considering it as a solution for improved transparency. This work proposes that XAI and responsible AI are significantly more deeply entwined. In this work, we explore state-of-the-art literature on RAI and XAI technologies. Based on our findings, we demonstrate that XAI can be utilized to ensure fairness, robustness, privacy, security, and transparency in a wide range of contexts. Our findings lead us to conclude that XAI is an essential foundation for every pillar of RAI.
Compared to CNN-based methods, Transformer-based methods achieve impressive image restoration outcomes due to their abilities to model remote dependencies. However, how to apply Transformer-based methods to the field of blind super-resolution (SR) and further make an SR network adaptive to degradation information is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose a new degradation-aware self-attention-based Transformer model, where we incorporate contrastive learning into the Transformer network for learning the degradation representations of input images with unknown noise. In particular, we integrate both CNN and Transformer components into the SR network, where we first use the CNN modulated by the degradation information to extract local features, and then employ the degradation-aware Transformer to extract global semantic features. We apply our proposed model to several popular large-scale benchmark datasets for testing, and achieve the state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods. In particular, our method yields a PSNR of 32.43 dB on the Urban100 dataset at $\times$2 scale, 0.94 dB higher than DASR, and 26.62 dB on the Urban100 dataset at $\times$4 scale, 0.26 dB improvement over KDSR, setting a new benchmark in this area. Source code is available at: https://github.com/I2-Multimedia-Lab/DSAT/tree/main.