arXiv subjects

Jing Yuan

Publications and source records attributed to Jing Yuan.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

A Random Algorithm for Profit Maximization with Multiple Adoptions in Online Social Networks

Online social networks have been one of the most effective platforms for marketing and advertising. Through "word of mouth" effects, information or product adoption could spread from some influential individuals to millions of users in social networks. Given a social network $G$ and a constant $k$, the influence maximization problem seeks for $k$ nodes in $G$ that can influence the largest number of nodes. This problem has found important applications, and a large amount of works have been devoted to identifying the few most influential users. But most of existing works only focus on the diffusion of a single idea or product in social networks. However, in reality, one company may produce multiple kinds of products and one user may also have multiple adoptions. Given multiple kinds of different products with different activation costs and profits, it is crucial for the company to distribute the limited budget among multiple products in order to achieve profit maximization. Profit Maximization with Multiple Adoptions (PM$^{2}$A) problem aims to seek for a seed set within the budget to maximize the overall profit. In this paper, a Randomized Modified Greedy (RMG) algorithm based on the Reverse Influence Sampling (RIS) technique is presented for the PM$^{2}$A problem, which could achieve a $(1-1/e-\varepsilon)$-approximate solution with high probability. Compared with the algorithm proposed in [16] that achieves a $\frac{1}{2}(1-1/e^{2})$-approximate solution, our algorithm provides a better performance ratio which is also the best performance ratio of the PM$^{2}$A problem. Comprehensive experiments on three real-world social networks are conducted, and the results demonstrate that our RMG algorithm outperforms the algorithm proposed in [16] and other heuristics in terms of profit maximization, and could better allocate the budget.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2020

Cascade Submodular Maximization: Question Selection and Sequencing in Online Personality Quiz

Personality quiz is a powerful tool that enables costumer segmentation by actively asking them questions, and marketers are using it as an effective method of generating leads and increasing e-commerce sales. In this paper, we study the problem of how to select and sequence a group of quiz questions so as to optimize the quality of customer segmentation. We assume that the customer will sequentially scan the list of questions. After reading a question, the customer makes two, possibly correlated, random decisions: 1) she first decides whether to answer this question or not, and then 2) decides whether to continue reading the next question or not. We further assume that the utility of questions that have been answered can be captured by a monotone and submodular function. In general, our problem falls into the category of non-adaptive active learning based customer profiling. Note that under the our model, the probability of a question being answered depends on the location of that question, as well as the set of other questions placed ahead of that question, this makes our problem fundamentally different from existing studies on submodular optimization. We develop a series of question selection and sequencing strategies with provable performance bound. Although we focus on the application of quiz design in this paper, our results apply to a broad range of applications, including assortment optimization with position bias effect.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Variational Fair Clustering

We propose a general variational framework of fair clustering, which integrates an original Kullback-Leibler (KL) fairness term with a large class of clustering objectives, including prototype or graph based. Fundamentally different from the existing combinatorial and spectral solutions, our variational multi-term approach enables to control the trade-off levels between the fairness and clustering objectives. We derive a general tight upper bound based on a concave-convex decomposition of our fairness term, its Lipschitz-gradient property and the Pinsker's inequality. Our tight upper bound can be jointly optimized with various clustering objectives, while yielding a scalable solution, with convergence guarantee. Interestingly, at each iteration, it performs an independent update for each assignment variable. Therefore, it can be easily distributed for large-scale datasets. This scalability is important as it enables to explore different trade-off levels between the fairness and clustering objectives. Unlike spectral relaxation, our formulation does not require computing its eigenvalue decomposition. We report comprehensive evaluations and comparisons with state-of-the-art methods over various fair-clustering benchmarks, which show that our variational formulation can yield highly competitive solutions in terms of fairness and clustering objectives.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Polarization-independent reconfigurable frequency selective rasorber/absorber with low insertion loss

A polarization-independent reconfigurable frequency selective rasorber (FSR)/absorber with low insertion loss based on diodes is proposed in this paper. The presented structure consists of a lossy layer based on square loops and a bandpass frequency-selective surface. These two layers are separated by an air layer. Each layer has an embedded bias network that provides the bias voltage to the diodes through metallic via. This configuration can avoid undesirable effects associated with the additional biasing wire. When the diodes are in off-state, the structure is in FSR mode and exhibits a transmission window at 4.28GHz with only 0.69dB insertion loss (IL) within the absorption bands. While diodes are in on-state and the structure switches to absorber mode, it achieves perfect absorption with absorptivity of over 90% ranging from 2.8 to 5.2 GHz. An equivalent circuit model (ECM) is developed to analyse the physical mechanism of the structure. A prototype of the proposed architecture is fabricated and measured, where reasonable agreements between simulations and measurements are observed, verifying the effectiveness of this design.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2020

Assortment Optimization with Repeated Exposures and Product-dependent Patience Cost

In this paper, we study the assortment optimization problem faced by many online retailers such as Amazon. We develop a \emph{cascade multinomial logit model}, based on the classic multinomial logit model, to capture the consumers' purchasing behavior across multiple stages. Different from existing studies, our model allows for repeated exposures of a product, i.e., the same product can be displayed multiple times across different stages. In addition, each consumer has a \emph{patience budget} that is sampled from a known distribution and each product is associated with a \emph{patience cost}, which captures the cognitive efforts spent on browsing that product. Given an assortment of products, a consumer sequentially browses them stage by stage. After browsing all products in one stage, if the utility of a product exceeds the utility of the outside option, the consumer proceeds to purchase the product and leave the platform. Otherwise, if the patience cost of all products browsed up to that point is no larger than her patience budget, she continues to view the next stage. We propose an approximation solution to this problem.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

CAE-RLSM: Consistent and Efficient Redundant Line Segment Merging for Online Feature Map Building

In order to obtain a compact line segment-based map representation for localization and planning of mobile robots, it is necessary to merge redundant line segments which physically represent the same part of the environment in different scans. In this paper, a consistent and efficient redundant line segment merging approach (CAE-RLSM) is proposed for online feature map building. The proposed CAE-RLSM is composed of two newly proposed modules: one-to-many incremental line segment merging (OTM-ILSM) and multi-processing global map adjustment (MP-GMA). Different from state-of-the-art offline merging approaches, the proposed CAE-RLSM can achieve real-time mapping performance, which not only reduces the redundancy of incremental merging with high efficiency, but also solves the problem of global map adjustment after loop closing to guarantee global consistency. Furthermore, a new correlation-based evaluation metric is proposed for the quality evaluation of line segment maps. This evaluation metric does not require manual measurement of the environmental metric information, instead it makes full use of globally consistent laser scans obtained by simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) systems to compare the performance of different line segment-based mapping approaches in an objective and fair manner. Comparative experimental results with respect to a mean shift-based offline redundant line segment merging approach (MS-RLSM) and an offline version of one-to-one incremental line segment merging approach (O$^2$TO-ILSM) on both public data sets and self-recorded data set are presented to show the superior performance of CAE-RLSM in terms of efficiency and map quality in different scenarios.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2020

Efficient ADMM and Splitting Methods for Continuous Min-cut and Max-flow Problems

The Potts model has many applications. It is equivalent to some min-cut and max-flow models. Primal-dual algorithms have been used to solve these problems. Due to the special structure of the models, convergence proof is still a difficult problem. In this work, we developed two novel, preconditioned, and over-relaxed alternating direction methods of multipliers (ADMM) with convergence guarantee for these models. Using the proposed preconditioners or block preconditioners, we get accelerations with the over-relaxation variants of preconditioned ADMM. The preconditioned and over-relaxed Douglas-Rachford splitting methods are also considered for the Potts model. Our framework can handle both the two-labeling or multi-labeling problems with appropriate block preconditioners based on Eckstein-Bertsekas and Fortin-Glowinski splitting techniques.

math.OC↗

arXiv2020

A deep belief network-based method to identify proteomic risk markers for Alzheimer disease

While a large body of research has formally identified apolipoprotein E (APOE) as a major genetic risk marker for Alzheimer disease, accumulating evidence supports the notion that other risk markers may exist. The traditional Alzheimer-specific signature analysis methods, however, have not been able to make full use of rich protein expression data, especially the interaction between attributes. This paper develops a novel feature selection method to identify pathogenic factors of Alzheimer disease using the proteomic and clinical data. This approach has taken the weights of network nodes as the importance order of signaling protein expression values. After generating and evaluating the candidate subset, the method helps to select an optimal subset of proteins that achieved an accuracy greater than 90%, which is superior to traditional machine learning methods for clinical Alzheimer disease diagnosis. Besides identifying a proteomic risk marker and further reinforce the link between metabolic risk factors and Alzheimer disease, this paper also suggests that apidonectin-linked pathways are a possible therapeutic drug target.

q-bio.QM↗

arXiv2020

Intelligent Radome Design Using Multilayer Metamaterial Structures to Realize Energy Isolation and Asymmetric Propagation of Electromagnetic Wave

An intelligent radome utilizing composite metamaterial structures is presented and investigated in this article, which can realize energy isolation and asymmetric propagation of electromagnetic (EM) wave self-adaptively by controlling states of PIN diodes. The whole structure mainly consists of a broadband polarization-sensitive polarization converter (PC) and an active frequency selective rasorber (AFSR) switching between a transmission mode and absorption mode which is used as an energy-selective surface (ESS). Among them, the function of the PC is to make the EM waves transmit asymmetrically, and the purpose of AFSR is to make the high-power waves be reflected or absorbed, which depends on the polarization type of the wave. Thus, the radome can realize both asymmetric propagations of EM wave and electromagnetic shielding. The equivalent circuit models (ECM) and parametric studies are considered to explain the physical operating mechanism of PC and AFSR. The fabricated structure with 7*7 unit cells is experimentally demonstrated and the measured results agree with simulated results well. Considering the distinctive characteristic of self-actuation, the presented concept has the potential application in electromagnetic stealth and HPEMWs shielding to protect communication devices.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2019

Product Sequencing and Pricing under Cascade Browse Model

In this paper, we study the joint product sequencing and pricing problem faced by many online retailers such as Amazon. We assume that consumers' purchase behavior can be explained by a ``consider-then-choose'' model: they first form a consideration set by screening a subset of products sequentially, and then decide which product to purchase from their consideration set. We propose a \emph{cascade browse model} to capture the consumers' browsing behavior, and use the Multinomial Logit (MNL) model as our choice model. We study two problems in this paper: in the first problem, we assume that each product has a fixed revenue and preference weight, the goal is to identify the best sequencing of products to offer so as to maximize the expected revenue subject to a cardinality constraint. We propose a constant approximate solution to this problem. As a byproduct, we propose the first fully polynomial-time approximation scheme (FPTAS) for the classic assortment optimization problem subject to one capacity constraint and one cardinality constraint. In the second problem, we treat the price of each product as a decision variable and our objective is to jointly decide a sequence of product and their prices to maximize the expected revenue. We propose a constant approximate solution to this problem.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2019

Adaptive Robust Optimization with Nearly Submodular Structure

Constrained submodular maximization has been extensively studied in the recent years. In this paper, we study adaptive robust optimization with nearly submodular structure (ARONSS). Our objective is to randomly select a subset of items that maximizes the worst-case value of several reward functions simultaneously. Our work differs from existing studies in two ways: (1) we study the robust optimization problem under the adaptive setting, i.e., one needs to adaptively select items based on the feedback collected from picked items, and (2) our results apply to a broad range of reward functions characterized by $ε$-nearly submodular function. We first analyze the adaptvity gap of ARONSS and show that the gap between the best adaptive solution and the best non-adaptive solution is bounded. Then we propose a approximate solution to this problem when all reward functions are submodular. Our algorithm achieves approximation ratio $(1-1/e)$ when considering matroid constraint. At last, we present two heuristics for the general case. All proposed solutions are non-adaptive which are easy to implement.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

No Time to Observe: Adaptive Influence Maximization with Partial Feedback

Although influence maximization problem has been extensively studied over the past ten years, majority of existing work adopt one of the following models: \emph{full-feedback model} or \emph{zero-feedback model}. In the zero-feedback model, we have to commit the seed users all at once in advance, this strategy is also known as non-adaptive policy. In the full-feedback model, we select one seed at a time and wait until the diffusion completes, before selecting the next seed. Full-feedback model has better performance but potentially huge delay, zero-feedback model has zero delay but poorer performance since it does not utilize the observation that may be made during the seeding process. To fill the gap between these two models, we propose \emph{Partial-feedback Model}, which allows us to select a seed at any intermediate stage. We develop two novel greedy policies that, for the first time, achieve bounded approximation ratios under both uniform and non-uniform cost settings.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2019

Isointense Infant Brain Segmentation with a Hyper-dense Connected Convolutional Neural Network

Neonatal brain segmentation in magnetic resonance (MR) is a challenging problem due to poor image quality and low contrast between white and gray matter regions. Most existing approaches for this problem are based on multi-atlas label fusion strategies, which are time-consuming and sensitive to registration errors. As alternative to these methods, we propose a hyper-densely connected 3D convolutional neural network that employs MR-T1 and T2 images as input, which are processed independently in two separated paths. An important difference with previous densely connected networks is the use of direct connections between layers from the same and different paths. Adopting such dense connectivity helps the learning process by including deep supervision and improving gradient flow. We evaluated our approach on data from the MICCAI Grand Challenge on 6-month infant Brain MRI Segmentation (iSEG), obtaining very competitive results. Among 21 teams, our approach ranked first or second in most metrics, translating into a state-of-the-art performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

HyperDense-Net: A hyper-densely connected CNN for multi-modal image segmentation

Recently, dense connections have attracted substantial attention in computer vision because they facilitate gradient flow and implicit deep supervision during training. Particularly, DenseNet, which connects each layer to every other layer in a feed-forward fashion, has shown impressive performances in natural image classification tasks. We propose HyperDenseNet, a 3D fully convolutional neural network that extends the definition of dense connectivity to multi-modal segmentation problems. Each imaging modality has a path, and dense connections occur not only between the pairs of layers within the same path, but also between those across different paths. This contrasts with the existing multi-modal CNN approaches, in which modeling several modalities relies entirely on a single joint layer (or level of abstraction) for fusion, typically either at the input or at the output of the network. Therefore, the proposed network has total freedom to learn more complex combinations between the modalities, within and in-between all the levels of abstraction, which increases significantly the learning representation. We report extensive evaluations over two different and highly competitive multi-modal brain tissue segmentation challenges, iSEG 2017 and MRBrainS 2013, with the former focusing on 6-month infant data and the latter on adult images. HyperDenseNet yielded significant improvements over many state-of-the-art segmentation networks, ranking at the top on both benchmarks. We further provide a comprehensive experimental analysis of features re-use, which confirms the importance of hyper-dense connections in multi-modal representation learning. Our code is publicly available at https://www.github.com/josedolz/HyperDenseNet.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Multi-region segmentation of bladder cancer structures in MRI with progressive dilated convolutional networks

Precise segmentation of bladder walls and tumor regions is an essential step towards non-invasive identification of tumor stage and grade, which is critical for treatment decision and prognosis of patients with bladder cancer (BC). However, the automatic delineation of bladder walls and tumor in magnetic resonance images (MRI) is a challenging task, due to important bladder shape variations, strong intensity inhomogeneity in urine and very high variability across population, particularly on tumors appearance. To tackle these issues, we propose to use a deep fully convolutional neural network. The proposed network includes dilated convolutions to increase the receptive field without incurring extra cost nor degrading its performance. Furthermore, we introduce progressive dilations in each convolutional block, thereby enabling extensive receptive fields without the need for large dilation rates. The proposed network is evaluated on 3.0T T2-weighted MRI scans from 60 pathologically confirmed patients with BC. Experiments shows the proposed model to achieve high accuracy, with a mean Dice similarity coefficient of 0.98, 0.84 and 0.69 for inner wall, outer wall and tumor region, respectively. These results represent a very good agreement with reference contours and an increase in performance compared to existing methods. In addition, inference times are less than a second for a whole 3D volume, which is between 2-3 orders of magnitude faster than related state-of-the-art methods for this application. We showed that a CNN can yield precise segmentation of bladder walls and tumors in bladder cancer patients on MRI. The whole segmentation process is fully-automatic and yields results in very good agreement with the reference standard, demonstrating the viability of deep learning models for the automatic multi-region segmentation of bladder cancer MRI images.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Variational Community Partition with Novel Network Structure Centrality Prior

In this paper, we proposed a novel two-stage optimization method for network community partition, which is based on inherent network structure information. The introduced optimization approach utilizes the new network centrality measure of both links and vertices to construct the key affinity description of the given network, where the direct similarities between graph nodes or nodal features are not available to obtain the classical affinity matrix. Indeed, such calculated network centrality information presents the essential structure of network, hence, the proper measure for detecting network communities, which also introduces a `confidence' criterion for referencing new labeled benchmark nodes. For the resulted challenging combinatorial optimization problem of graph clustering, the proposed optimization method iteratively employs an efficient convex optimization algorithm which is developed based under a new variational perspective of primal and dual. Experiments over both artificial and real-world network datasets demonstrate that the proposed optimization strategy of community detection significantly improves result accuracy and outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of accuracy and reliability.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2018

Modern Convex Optimization to Medical Image Analysis

Recently, diagnosis, therapy and monitoring of human diseases involve a variety of imaging modalities, such as magnetic resonance imaging(MRI), computed tomography(CT), Ultrasound(US) and Positron-emission tomography(PET) as well as a variety of modern optical techniques. Over the past two decade, it has been recognized that advanced image processing techniques provide valuable information to physicians for diagnosis, image guided therapy and surgery, and monitoring of the treated organ to the therapy. Many researchers and companies have invested significant efforts in the developments of advanced medical image analysis methods; especially in the two core studies of medical image segmentation and registration, segmentations of organs and lesions are used to quantify volumes and shapes used in diagnosis and monitoring treatment; registration of multimodality images of organs improves detection, diagnosis and staging of diseases as well as image-guided surgery and therapy, registration of images obtained from the same modality are used to monitor progression of therapy. These challenging clinical-motivated applications introduce novel and sophisticated mathematical problems which stimulate developments of advanced optimization and computing methods, especially convex optimization attaining optimum in a global sense, hence, bring an enormous spread of research topics for recent computational medical image analysis. Particularly, distinct from the usual image processing, most medical images have a big volume of acquired data, often in 3D or 4D (3D + t) along with great noises or incomplete image information, and form the challenging large-scale optimization problems; how to process such poor 'big data' of medical images efficiently and solve the corresponding optimization problems robustly are the key factors of modern medical image analysis.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Deep CNN ensembles and suggestive annotations for infant brain MRI segmentation

Precise 3D segmentation of infant brain tissues is an essential step towards comprehensive volumetric studies and quantitative analysis of early brain developement. However, computing such segmentations is very challenging, especially for 6-month infant brain, due to the poor image quality, among other difficulties inherent to infant brain MRI, e.g., the isointense contrast between white and gray matter and the severe partial volume effect due to small brain sizes. This study investigates the problem with an ensemble of semi-dense fully convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which employs T1-weighted and T2-weighted MR images as input. We demonstrate that the ensemble agreement is highly correlated with the segmentation errors. Therefore, our method provides measures that can guide local user corrections. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first ensemble of 3D CNNs for suggesting annotations within images. Furthermore, inspired by the very recent success of dense networks, we propose a novel architecture, SemiDenseNet, which connects all convolutional layers directly to the end of the network. Our architecture allows the efficient propagation of gradients during training, while limiting the number of parameters, requiring one order of magnitude less parameters than popular medical image segmentation networks such as 3D U-Net. Another contribution of our work is the study of the impact that early or late fusions of multiple image modalities might have on the performances of deep architectures. We report evaluations of our method on the public data of the MICCAI iSEG-2017 Challenge on 6-month infant brain MRI segmentation, and show very competitive results among 21 teams, ranking first or second in most metrics.

cs.CV↗