Models, code, and papers for "Wei Wei":

##### Comparison of multi-task convolutional neural network (MT-CNN) and a few other methods for toxicity prediction

Mar 31, 2017
Kedi Wu, Guo-Wei Wei

Toxicity analysis and prediction are of paramount importance to human health and environmental protection. Existing computational methods are built from a wide variety of descriptors and regressors, which makes their performance analysis difficult. For example, deep neural network (DNN), a successful approach in many occasions, acts like a black box and offers little conceptual elegance or physical understanding. The present work constructs a common set of microscopic descriptors based on established physical models for charges, surface areas and free energies to assess the performance of multi-task convolutional neural network (MT-CNN) architectures and a few other approaches, including random forest (RF) and gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT), on an equal footing. Comparison is also given to convolutional neural network (CNN) and non-convolutional deep neural network (DNN) algorithms. Four benchmark toxicity data sets (i.e., endpoints) are used to evaluate various approaches. Extensive numerical studies indicate that the present MT-CNN architecture is able to outperform the state-of-the-art methods.

##### Regression trees for longitudinal and multiresponse data

May 27, 2013
Wei-Yin Loh, Wei Zheng

Previous algorithms for constructing regression tree models for longitudinal and multiresponse data have mostly followed the CART approach. Consequently, they inherit the same selection biases and computational difficulties as CART. We propose an alternative, based on the GUIDE approach, that treats each longitudinal data series as a curve and uses chi-squared tests of the residual curve patterns to select a variable to split each node of the tree. Besides being unbiased, the method is applicable to data with fixed and random time points and with missing values in the response or predictor variables. Simulation results comparing its mean squared prediction error with that of MVPART are given, as well as examples comparing it with standard linear mixed effects and generalized estimating equation models. Conditions for asymptotic consistency of regression tree function estimates are also given.

* Annals of Applied Statistics 2013, Vol. 7, No. 1, 495-522
* Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-AOAS596 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)
##### Towards Combining On-Off-Policy Methods for Real-World Applications

In this paper, we point out a fundamental property of the objective in reinforcement learning, with which we can reformulate the policy gradient objective into a perceptron-like loss function, removing the need to distinguish between on and off policy training. Namely, we posit that it is sufficient to only update a policy $\pi$ for cases that satisfy the condition $A(\frac{\pi}{\mu}-1)\leq0$, where $A$ is the advantage, and $\mu$ is another policy. Furthermore, we show via theoretic derivation that a perceptron-like loss function matches the clipped surrogate objective for PPO. With our new formulation, the policies $\pi$ and $\mu$ can be arbitrarily apart in theory, effectively enabling off-policy training. To examine our derivations, we can combine the on-policy PPO clipped surrogate (which we show to be equivalent with one instance of the new reformation) with the off-policy IMPALA method. We first verify the combined method on the OpenAI Gym pendulum toy problem. Next, we use our method to train a quadrotor position controller in a simulator. Our trained policy is efficient and lightweight enough to perform in a low cost micro-controller at a minimum update rate of 500 Hz. For the quadrotor, we show two experiments to verify our method and demonstrate performance: 1) hovering at a fixed position, and 2) tracking along a specific trajectory. In preliminary trials, we are also able to apply the method to a real-world quadrotor.

##### UTCNN: a Deep Learning Model of Stance Classificationon on Social Media Text

Nov 11, 2016
Wei-Fan Chen, Lun-Wei Ku

Most neural network models for document classification on social media focus on text infor-mation to the neglect of other information on these platforms. In this paper, we classify post stance on social media channels and develop UTCNN, a neural network model that incorporates user tastes, topic tastes, and user comments on posts. UTCNN not only works on social media texts, but also analyzes texts in forums and message boards. Experiments performed on Chinese Facebook data and English online debate forum data show that UTCNN achieves a 0.755 macro-average f-score for supportive, neutral, and unsupportive stance classes on Facebook data, which is significantly better than models in which either user, topic, or comment information is withheld. This model design greatly mitigates the lack of data for the minor class without the use of oversampling. In addition, UTCNN yields a 0.842 accuracy on English online debate forum data, which also significantly outperforms results from previous work as well as other deep learning models, showing that UTCNN performs well regardless of language or platform.

* 11 pages, to appear in COLING 2016
##### PersonRank: Detecting Important People in Images

Nov 06, 2017
Wei-Hong Li, Benchao Li, Wei-Shi Zheng

Always, some individuals in images are more important/attractive than others in some events such as presentation, basketball game or speech. However, it is challenging to find important people among all individuals in images directly based on their spatial or appearance information due to the existence of diverse variations of pose, action, appearance of persons and various changes of occasions. We overcome this difficulty by constructing a multiple Hyper-Interaction Graph to treat each individual in an image as a node and inferring the most active node referring to interactions estimated by various types of clews. We model pairwise interactions between persons as the edge message communicated between nodes, resulting in a bidirectional pairwise-interaction graph. To enrich the personperson interaction estimation, we further introduce a unidirectional hyper-interaction graph that models the consensus of interaction between a focal person and any person in a local region around. Finally, we modify the PageRank algorithm to infer the activeness of persons on the multiple Hybrid-Interaction Graph (HIG), the union of the pairwise-interaction and hyperinteraction graphs, and we call our algorithm the PersonRank. In order to provide publicable datasets for evaluation, we have contributed a new dataset called Multi-scene Important People Image Dataset and gathered a NCAA Basketball Image Dataset from sports game sequences. We have demonstrated that the proposed PersonRank outperforms related methods clearly and substantially.

* 8 pages, conference
##### One-pass Person Re-identification by Sketch Online Discriminant Analysis

Nov 09, 2017
Wei-Hong Li, Zhuowei Zhong, Wei-Shi Zheng

Person re-identification (re-id) is to match people across disjoint camera views in a multi-camera system, and re-id has been an important technology applied in smart city in recent years. However, the majority of existing person re-id methods are not designed for processing sequential data in an online way. This ignores the real-world scenario that person images detected from multi-cameras system are coming sequentially. While there is a few work on discussing online re-id, most of them require considerable storage of all passed data samples that have been ever observed, and this could be unrealistic for processing data from a large camera network. In this work, we present an onepass person re-id model that adapts the re-id model based on each newly observed data and no passed data are directly used for each update. More specifically, we develop an Sketch online Discriminant Analysis (SoDA) by embedding sketch processing into Fisher discriminant analysis (FDA). SoDA can efficiently keep the main data variations of all passed samples in a low rank matrix when processing sequential data samples, and estimate the approximate within-class variance (i.e. within-class covariance matrix) from the sketch data information. We provide theoretical analysis on the effect of the estimated approximate within-class covariance matrix. In particular, we derive upper and lower bounds on the Fisher discriminant score (i.e. the quotient between between-class variation and within-class variation after feature transformation) in order to investigate how the optimal feature transformation learned by SoDA sequentially approximates the offline FDA that is learned on all observed data. Extensive experimental results have shown the effectiveness of our SoDA and empirically support our theoretical analysis.

* Online learning, Person re-identification, Discriminant feature extraction
##### Mask-CNN: Localizing Parts and Selecting Descriptors for Fine-Grained Image Recognition

May 23, 2016
Xiu-Shen Wei, Chen-Wei Xie, Jianxin Wu

Fine-grained image recognition is a challenging computer vision problem, due to the small inter-class variations caused by highly similar subordinate categories, and the large intra-class variations in poses, scales and rotations. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end Mask-CNN model without the fully connected layers for fine-grained recognition. Based on the part annotations of fine-grained images, the proposed model consists of a fully convolutional network to both locate the discriminative parts (e.g., head and torso), and more importantly generate object/part masks for selecting useful and meaningful convolutional descriptors. After that, a four-stream Mask-CNN model is built for aggregating the selected object- and part-level descriptors simultaneously. The proposed Mask-CNN model has the smallest number of parameters, lowest feature dimensionality and highest recognition accuracy when compared with state-of-the-arts fine-grained approaches.

* Submitted to NIPS 2016
##### Multimodal Emotion Recognition Using Multimodal Deep Learning

Feb 26, 2016
Wei Liu, Wei-Long Zheng, Bao-Liang Lu

To enhance the performance of affective models and reduce the cost of acquiring physiological signals for real-world applications, we adopt multimodal deep learning approach to construct affective models from multiple physiological signals. For unimodal enhancement task, we indicate that the best recognition accuracy of 82.11% on SEED dataset is achieved with shared representations generated by Deep AutoEncoder (DAE) model. For multimodal facilitation tasks, we demonstrate that the Bimodal Deep AutoEncoder (BDAE) achieves the mean accuracies of 91.01% and 83.25% on SEED and DEAP datasets, respectively, which are much superior to the state-of-the-art approaches. For cross-modal learning task, our experimental results demonstrate that the mean accuracy of 66.34% is achieved on SEED dataset through shared representations generated by EEG-based DAE as training samples and shared representations generated by eye-based DAE as testing sample, and vice versa.

##### Differentiable Neural Architecture Search via Proximal Iterations

May 30, 2019
Quanming Yao, Ju Xu, Wei-Wei Tu, Zhanxing Zhu

Neural architecture search (NAS) recently attracts much research attention because of its ability to identify better architectures than handcrafted ones. However, many NAS methods, which optimize the search process in a discrete search space, need many GPU days for convergence. Recently, DARTS, which constructs a differentiable search space and then optimizes it by gradient descent, can obtain high-performance architecture and reduces the search time to several days. However, DARTS is still slow as it updates an ensemble of all operations and keeps only one after convergence. Besides, DARTS can converge to inferior architectures due to the strong correlation among operations. In this paper, we propose a new differentiable Neural Architecture Search method based on Proximal gradient descent (denoted as NASP). Different from DARTS, NASP reformulates the search process as an optimization problem with a constraint that only one operation is allowed to be updated during forward and backward propagation. Since the constraint is hard to deal with, we propose a new algorithm inspired by proximal iterations to solve it. Experiments on various tasks demonstrate that NASP can obtain high-performance architectures with 10 times of speedup on the computational time than DARTS.

##### Learning to Learn Relation for Important People Detection in Still Images

Apr 07, 2019
Wei-Hong Li, Fa-Ting Hong, Wei-Shi Zheng

Humans can easily recognize the importance of people in social event images, and they always focus on the most important individuals. However, learning to learn the relation between people in an image, and inferring the most important person based on this relation, remains undeveloped. In this work, we propose a deep imPOrtance relatIon NeTwork (POINT) that combines both relation modeling and feature learning. In particular, we infer two types of interaction modules: the person-person interaction module that learns the interaction between people and the event-person interaction module that learns to describe how a person is involved in the event occurring in an image. We then estimate the importance relations among people from both interactions and encode the relation feature from the importance relations. In this way, POINT automatically learns several types of relation features in parallel, and we aggregate these relation features and the person's feature to form the importance feature for important people classification. Extensive experimental results show that our method is effective for important people detection and verify the efficacy of learning to learn relations for important people detection.

* Important people detection, Relation Network, POINT
##### The Mixing method: low-rank coordinate descent for semidefinite programming with diagonal constraints

Jul 04, 2018
Po-Wei Wang, Wei-Cheng Chang, J. Zico Kolter

In this paper, we propose a low-rank coordinate descent approach to structured semidefinite programming with diagonal constraints. The approach, which we call the Mixing method, is extremely simple to implement, has no free parameters, and typically attains an order of magnitude or better improvement in optimization performance over the current state of the art. We show that the method is strictly decreasing, converges to a critical point, and further that for sufficient rank all non-optimal critical points are unstable. Moreover, we prove that with a step size, the Mixing method converges to the global optimum of the semidefinite program almost surely in a locally linear rate under random initialization. This is the first low-rank semidefinite programming method that has been shown to achieve a global optimum on the spherical manifold without assumption. We apply our algorithm to two related domains: solving the maximum cut semidefinite relaxation, and solving a maximum satisfiability relaxation (we also briefly consider additional applications such as learning word embeddings). In all settings, we demonstrate substantial improvement over the existing state of the art along various dimensions, and in total, this work expands the scope and scale of problems that can be solved using semidefinite programming methods.

##### Learning to Discriminate Perturbations for Blocking Adversarial Attacks in Text Classification

Sep 06, 2019
Yichao Zhou, Jyun-Yu Jiang, Kai-Wei Chang, Wei Wang

Adversarial attacks against machine learning models have threatened various real-world applications such as spam filtering and sentiment analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, learning to DIScriminate Perturbations (DISP), to identify and adjust malicious perturbations, thereby blocking adversarial attacks for text classification models. To identify adversarial attacks, a perturbation discriminator validates how likely a token in the text is perturbed and provides a set of potential perturbations. For each potential perturbation, an embedding estimator learns to restore the embedding of the original word based on the context and a replacement token is chosen based on approximate kNN search. DISP can block adversarial attacks for any NLP model without modifying the model structure or training procedure. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that DISP significantly outperforms baseline methods in blocking adversarial attacks for text classification. In addition, in-depth analysis shows the robustness of DISP across different situations.

* 10 pages, 8 tables, 4 figures
##### Dual Adaptivity: A Universal Algorithm for Minimizing the Adaptive Regret of Convex Functions

Jun 26, 2019
Lijun Zhang, Guanghui Wang, Wei-Wei Tu, Zhi-Hua Zhou

To deal with changing environments, a new performance measure---adaptive regret, defined as the maximum static regret over any interval, is proposed in online learning. Under the setting of online convex optimization, several algorithms have been successfully developed to minimize the adaptive regret. However, existing algorithms lack universality in the sense that they can only handle one type of convex functions and need apriori knowledge of parameters. By contrast, there exist universal algorithms, such as MetaGrad, that attain optimal static regret for multiple types of convex functions simultaneously. Along this line of research, this paper presents the first universal algorithm for minimizing the adaptive regret of convex functions. Specifically, we borrow the idea of maintaining multiple learning rates in MetaGrad to handle the uncertainty of functions, and utilize the technique of sleeping experts to capture changing environments. In this way, our algorithm automatically adapts to the property of functions (convex, exponentially concave, or strongly convex), as well as the nature of environments (stationary or changing). As a by product, it also allows the type of functions to switch between rounds.

##### A New Algorithm for Non-stationary Contextual Bandits: Efficient, Optimal, and Parameter-free

Feb 05, 2019
Yifang Chen, Chung-Wei Lee, Haipeng Luo, Chen-Yu Wei

We propose the first contextual bandit algorithm that is parameter-free, efficient, and optimal in terms of dynamic regret. Specifically, our algorithm achieves dynamic regret $\mathcal{O}(\min\{\sqrt{ST}, \Delta^{\frac{1}{3}}T^{\frac{2}{3}}\})$ for a contextual bandit problem with $T$ rounds, $S$ switches and $\Delta$ total variation in data distributions. Importantly, our algorithm is adaptive and does not need to know $S$ or $\Delta$ ahead of time, and can be implemented efficiently assuming access to an ERM oracle. Our results strictly improve the $\mathcal{O}(\min \{S^{\frac{1}{4}}T^{\frac{3}{4}}, \Delta^{\frac{1}{5}}T^{\frac{4}{5}}\})$ bound of (Luo et al., 2018), and greatly generalize and improve the $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{ST})$ result of (Auer et al, 2018) that holds only for the two-armed bandit problem without contextual information. The key novelty of our algorithm is to introduce replay phases, in which the algorithm acts according to its previous decisions for a certain amount of time in order to detect non-stationarity while maintaining a good balance between exploration and exploitation.

##### Feature functional theory - binding predictor (FFT-BP) for the blind prediction of binding free energies

Mar 31, 2017
Bao Wang, Zhixiong Zhao, Duc D. Nguyen, Guo-Wei Wei

We present a feature functional theory - binding predictor (FFT-BP) for the protein-ligand binding affinity prediction. The underpinning assumptions of FFT-BP are as follows: i) representability: there exists a microscopic feature vector that can uniquely characterize and distinguish one protein-ligand complex from another; ii) feature-function relationship: the macroscopic features, including binding free energy, of a complex is a functional of microscopic feature vectors; and iii) similarity: molecules with similar microscopic features have similar macroscopic features, such as binding affinity. Physical models, such as implicit solvent models and quantum theory, are utilized to extract microscopic features, while machine learning algorithms are employed to rank the similarity among protein-ligand complexes. A large variety of numerical validations and tests confirms the accuracy and robustness of the proposed FFT-BP model. The root mean square errors (RMSEs) of FFT-BP blind predictions of a benchmark set of 100 complexes, the PDBBind v2007 core set of 195 complexes and the PDBBind v2015 core set of 195 complexes are 1.99, 2.02 and 1.92 kcal/mol, respectively. Their corresponding Pearson correlation coefficients are 0.75, 0.80, and 0.78, respectively.

* 25 pages, 11 figures
##### Multimodal Emotion Recognition Using Deep Canonical Correlation Analysis

Aug 13, 2019
Wei Liu, Jie-Lin Qiu, Wei-Long Zheng, Bao-Liang Lu

Multimodal signals are more powerful than unimodal data for emotion recognition since they can represent emotions more comprehensively. In this paper, we introduce deep canonical correlation analysis (DCCA) to multimodal emotion recognition. The basic idea behind DCCA is to transform each modality separately and coordinate different modalities into a hyperspace by using specified canonical correlation analysis constraints. We evaluate the performance of DCCA on five multimodal datasets: the SEED, SEED-IV, SEED-V, DEAP, and DREAMER datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that DCCA achieves state-of-the-art recognition accuracy rates on all five datasets: 94.58% on the SEED dataset, 87.45% on the SEED-IV dataset, 84.33% and 85.62% for two binary classification tasks and 88.51% for a four-category classification task on the DEAP dataset, 83.08% on the SEED-V dataset, and 88.99%, 90.57%, and 90.67% for three binary classification tasks on the DREAMER dataset. We also compare the noise robustness of DCCA with that of existing methods when adding various amounts of noise to the SEED-V dataset. The experimental results indicate that DCCA has greater robustness. By visualizing feature distributions with t-SNE and calculating the mutual information between different modalities before and after using DCCA, we find that the features transformed by DCCA from different modalities are more homogeneous and discriminative across emotions.

##### Learning Gender-Neutral Word Embeddings

Aug 29, 2018
Jieyu Zhao, Yichao Zhou, Zeyu Li, Wei Wang, Kai-Wei Chang

Word embedding models have become a fundamental component in a wide range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. However, embeddings trained on human-generated corpora have been demonstrated to inherit strong gender stereotypes that reflect social constructs. To address this concern, in this paper, we propose a novel training procedure for learning gender-neutral word embeddings. Our approach aims to preserve gender information in certain dimensions of word vectors while compelling other dimensions to be free of gender influence. Based on the proposed method, we generate a Gender-Neutral variant of GloVe (GN-GloVe). Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that GN-GloVe successfully isolates gender information without sacrificing the functionality of the embedding model.

* EMNLP 2018
##### Personalized word representations Carrying Personalized Semantics Learned from Social Network Posts

Oct 29, 2017
Zih-Wei Lin, Tzu-Wei Sung, Hung-Yi Lee, Lin-Shan Lee

Distributed word representations have been shown to be very useful in various natural language processing (NLP) application tasks. These word vectors learned from huge corpora very often carry both semantic and syntactic information of words. However, it is well known that each individual user has his own language patterns because of different factors such as interested topics, friend groups, social activities, wording habits, etc., which may imply some kind of personalized semantics. With such personalized semantics, the same word may imply slightly differently for different users. For example, the word "Cappuccino" may imply "Leisure", "Joy", "Excellent" for a user enjoying coffee, by only a kind of drink for someone else. Such personalized semantics of course cannot be carried by the standard universal word vectors trained with huge corpora produced by many people. In this paper, we propose a framework to train different personalized word vectors for different users based on the very successful continuous skip-gram model using the social network data posted by many individual users. In this framework, universal background word vectors are first learned from the background corpora, and then adapted by the personalized corpus for each individual user to learn the personalized word vectors. We use two application tasks to evaluate the quality of the personalized word vectors obtained in this way, the user prediction task and the sentence completion task. These personalized word vectors were shown to carry some personalized semantics and offer improved performance on these two evaluation tasks.

* Accepted by the 12th biannual IEEE workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU'17)
##### Empirical Study on Deep Learning Models for Question Answering

Nov 20, 2015
Yang Yu, Wei Zhang, Chung-Wei Hang, Bing Xiang, Bowen Zhou

In this paper we explore deep learning models with memory component or attention mechanism for question answering task. We combine and compare three models, Neural Machine Translation, Neural Turing Machine, and Memory Networks for a simulated QA data set. This paper is the first one that uses Neural Machine Translation and Neural Turing Machines for solving QA tasks. Our results suggest that the combination of attention and memory have potential to solve certain QA problem.

##### IllinoisSL: A JAVA Library for Structured Prediction

Sep 23, 2015
Kai-Wei Chang, Shyam Upadhyay, Ming-Wei Chang, Vivek Srikumar, Dan Roth

IllinoisSL is a Java library for learning structured prediction models. It supports structured Support Vector Machines and structured Perceptron. The library consists of a core learning module and several applications, which can be executed from command-lines. Documentation is provided to guide users. In Comparison to other structured learning libraries, IllinoisSL is efficient, general, and easy to use.

* http://cogcomp.cs.illinois.edu/software/illinois-sl