arXiv subjects

Victor S. Sheng

Publications and source records attributed to Victor S. Sheng.

35 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Ensemble Modeling with Contrastive Knowledge Distillation for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation aims to capture users' dynamic interest and predicts the next item of users' preference. Most sequential recommendation methods use a deep neural network as sequence encoder to generate user and item representations. Existing works mainly center upon designing a stronger sequence encoder. However, few attempts have been made with training an ensemble of networks as sequence encoders, which is more powerful than a single network because an ensemble of parallel networks can yield diverse prediction results and hence better accuracy. In this paper, we present Ensemble Modeling with contrastive Knowledge Distillation for sequential recommendation (EMKD). Our framework adopts multiple parallel networks as an ensemble of sequence encoders and recommends items based on the output distributions of all these networks. To facilitate knowledge transfer between parallel networks, we propose a novel contrastive knowledge distillation approach, which performs knowledge transfer from the representation level via Intra-network Contrastive Learning (ICL) and Cross-network Contrastive Learning (CCL), as well as Knowledge Distillation (KD) from the logits level via minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the output distributions of the teacher network and the student network. To leverage contextual information, we train the primary masked item prediction task alongside the auxiliary attribute prediction task as a multi-task learning scheme. Extensive experiments on public benchmark datasets show that EMKD achieves a significant improvement compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Besides, we demonstrate that our ensemble method is a generalized approach that can also improve the performance of other sequential recommenders. Our code is available at this link: https://github.com/hw-du/EMKD.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2023

Sequential Recommendation with Probabilistic Logical Reasoning

Deep learning and symbolic learning are two frequently employed methods in Sequential Recommendation (SR). Recent neural-symbolic SR models demonstrate their potential to enable SR to be equipped with concurrent perception and cognition capacities. However, neural-symbolic SR remains a challenging problem due to open issues like representing users and items in logical reasoning. In this paper, we combine the Deep Neural Network (DNN) SR models with logical reasoning and propose a general framework named Sequential Recommendation with Probabilistic Logical Reasoning (short for SR-PLR). This framework allows SR-PLR to benefit from both similarity matching and logical reasoning by disentangling feature embedding and logic embedding in the DNN and probabilistic logic network. To better capture the uncertainty and evolution of user tastes, SR-PLR embeds users and items with a probabilistic method and conducts probabilistic logical reasoning on users' interaction patterns. Then the feature and logic representations learned from the DNN and logic network are concatenated to make the prediction. Finally, experiments on various sequential recommendation models demonstrate the effectiveness of the SR-PLR.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2023

Contrastive Enhanced Slide Filter Mixer for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation (SR) aims to model user preferences by capturing behavior patterns from their item historical interaction data. Most existing methods model user preference in the time domain, omitting the fact that users' behaviors are also influenced by various frequency patterns that are difficult to separate in the entangled chronological items. However, few attempts have been made to train SR in the frequency domain, and it is still unclear how to use the frequency components to learn an appropriate representation for the user. To solve this problem, we shift the viewpoint to the frequency domain and propose a novel Contrastive Enhanced \textbf{SLI}de Filter \textbf{M}ixEr for Sequential \textbf{Rec}ommendation, named \textbf{SLIME4Rec}. Specifically, we design a frequency ramp structure to allow the learnable filter slide on the frequency spectrums across different layers to capture different frequency patterns. Moreover, a Dynamic Frequency Selection (DFS) and a Static Frequency Split (SFS) module are proposed to replace the self-attention module for effectively extracting frequency information in two ways. DFS is used to select helpful frequency components dynamically, and SFS is combined with the dynamic frequency selection module to provide a more fine-grained frequency division. Finally, contrastive learning is utilized to improve the quality of user embedding learned from the frequency domain. Extensive experiments conducted on five widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate our proposed model performs significantly better than the state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/sudaada/SLIME4Rec.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2023

Privacy-Preserving Representation Learning for Text-Attributed Networks with Simplicial Complexes

Although recent network representation learning (NRL) works in text-attributed networks demonstrated superior performance for various graph inference tasks, learning network representations could always raise privacy concerns when nodes represent people or human-related variables. Moreover, standard NRLs that leverage structural information from a graph proceed by first encoding pairwise relationships into learned representations and then analysing its properties. This approach is fundamentally misaligned with problems where the relationships involve multiple points, and topological structure must be encoded beyond pairwise interactions. Fortunately, the machinery of topological data analysis (TDA) and, in particular, simplicial neural networks (SNNs) offer a mathematically rigorous framework to learn higher-order interactions between nodes. It is critical to investigate if the representation outputs from SNNs are more vulnerable compared to regular representation outputs from graph neural networks (GNNs) via pairwise interactions. In my dissertation, I will first study learning the representations with text attributes for simplicial complexes (RT4SC) via SNNs. Then, I will conduct research on two potential attacks on the representation outputs from SNNs: (1) membership inference attack, which infers whether a certain node of a graph is inside the training data of the GNN model; and (2) graph reconstruction attacks, which infer the confidential edges of a text-attributed network. Finally, I will study a privacy-preserving deterministic differentially private alternating direction method of multiplier to learn secure representation outputs from SNNs that capture multi-scale relationships and facilitate the passage from local structure to global invariant features on text-attributed networks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Measuring the Privacy Leakage via Graph Reconstruction Attacks on Simplicial Neural Networks (Student Abstract)

In this paper, we measure the privacy leakage via studying whether graph representations can be inverted to recover the graph used to generate them via graph reconstruction attack (GRA). We propose a GRA that recovers a graph's adjacency matrix from the representations via a graph decoder that minimizes the reconstruction loss between the partial graph and the reconstructed graph. We study three types of representations that are trained on the graph, i.e., representations output from graph convolutional network (GCN), graph attention network (GAT), and our proposed simplicial neural network (SNN) via a higher-order combinatorial Laplacian. Unlike the first two types of representations that only encode pairwise relationships, the third type of representation, i.e., SNN outputs, encodes higher-order interactions (e.g., homological features) between nodes. We find that the SNN outputs reveal the lowest privacy-preserving ability to defend the GRA, followed by those of GATs and GCNs, which indicates the importance of building more private representations with higher-order node information that could defend the potential threats, such as GRAs.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

A Roadmap to Domain Knowledge Integration in Machine Learning

Many machine learning algorithms have been developed in recent years to enhance the performance of a model in different aspects of artificial intelligence. But the problem persists due to inadequate data and resources. Integrating knowledge in a machine learning model can help to overcome these obstacles up to a certain degree. Incorporating knowledge is a complex task though because of various forms of knowledge representation. In this paper, we will give a brief overview of these different forms of knowledge integration and their performance in certain machine learning tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Class-attention Video Transformer for Engagement Intensity Prediction

In order to deal with variant-length long videos, prior works extract multi-modal features and fuse them to predict students' engagement intensity. In this paper, we present a new end-to-end method Class Attention in Video Transformer (CavT), which involves a single vector to process class embedding and to uniformly perform end-to-end learning on variant-length long videos and fixed-length short videos. Furthermore, to address the lack of sufficient samples, we propose a binary-order representatives sampling method (BorS) to add multiple video sequences of each video to augment the training set. BorS+CavT not only achieves the state-of-the-art MSE (0.0495) on the EmotiW-EP dataset, but also obtains the state-of-the-art MSE (0.0377) on the DAiSEE dataset. The code and models have been made publicly available at https://github.com/mountainai/cavt.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Contrastive Learning with Bidirectional Transformers for Sequential Recommendation

Contrastive learning with Transformer-based sequence encoder has gained predominance for sequential recommendation. It maximizes the agreements between paired sequence augmentations that share similar semantics. However, existing contrastive learning approaches in sequential recommendation mainly center upon left-to-right unidirectional Transformers as base encoders, which are suboptimal for sequential recommendation because user behaviors may not be a rigid left-to-right sequence. To tackle that, we propose a novel framework named \textbf{C}ontrastive learning with \textbf{Bi}directional \textbf{T}ransformers for sequential recommendation (\textbf{CBiT}). Specifically, we first apply the slide window technique for long user sequences in bidirectional Transformers, which allows for a more fine-grained division of user sequences. Then we combine the cloze task mask and the dropout mask to generate high-quality positive samples and perform multi-pair contrastive learning, which demonstrates better performance and adaptability compared with the normal one-pair contrastive learning. Moreover, we introduce a novel dynamic loss reweighting strategy to balance between the cloze task loss and the contrastive loss. Experiment results on three public benchmark datasets show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art models for sequential recommendation.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2022

Knowledge Distillation via Weighted Ensemble of Teaching Assistants

Knowledge distillation in machine learning is the process of transferring knowledge from a large model called the teacher to a smaller model called the student. Knowledge distillation is one of the techniques to compress the large network (teacher) to a smaller network (student) that can be deployed in small devices such as mobile phones. When the network size gap between the teacher and student increases, the performance of the student network decreases. To solve this problem, an intermediate model is employed between the teacher model and the student model known as the teaching assistant model, which in turn bridges the gap between the teacher and the student. In this research, we have shown that using multiple teaching assistant models, the student model (the smaller model) can be further improved. We combined these multiple teaching assistant models using weighted ensemble learning where we have used a differential evaluation optimization algorithm to generate the weight values.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Learnable Model Augmentation Self-Supervised Learning for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential Recommendation aims to predict the next item based on user behaviour. Recently, Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has been proposed to improve recommendation performance. However, most of existing SSL methods use a uniform data augmentation scheme, which loses the sequence correlation of an original sequence. To this end, in this paper, we propose a Learnable Model Augmentation self-supervised learning for sequential Recommendation (LMA4Rec). Specifically, LMA4Rec first takes model augmentation as a supplementary method for data augmentation to generate views. Then, LMA4Rec uses learnable Bernoulli dropout to implement model augmentation learnable operations. Next, self-supervised learning is used between the contrastive views to extract self-supervised signals from an original sequence. Finally, experiments on three public datasets show that the LMA4Rec method effectively improves sequential recommendation performance compared with baseline methods.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

Edge-Enhanced Global Disentangled Graph Neural Network for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation has been a widely popular topic of recommender systems. Existing works have contributed to enhancing the prediction ability of sequential recommendation systems based on various methods, such as recurrent networks and self-attention mechanisms. However, they fail to discover and distinguish various relationships between items, which could be underlying factors which motivate user behaviors. In this paper, we propose an Edge-Enhanced Global Disentangled Graph Neural Network (EGD-GNN) model to capture the relation information between items for global item representation and local user intention learning. At the global level, we build a global-link graph over all sequences to model item relationships. Then a channel-aware disentangled learning layer is designed to decompose edge information into different channels, which can be aggregated to represent the target item from its neighbors. At the local level, we apply a variational auto-encoder framework to learn user intention over the current sequence. We evaluate our proposed method on three real-world datasets. Experimental results show that our model can get a crucial improvement over state-of-the-art baselines and is able to distinguish item features.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

Quaternion-Based Graph Convolution Network for Recommendation

Graph Convolution Network (GCN) has been widely applied in recommender systems for its representation learning capability on user and item embeddings. However, GCN is vulnerable to noisy and incomplete graphs, which are common in real world, due to its recursive message propagation mechanism. In the literature, some work propose to remove the feature transformation during message propagation, but making it unable to effectively capture the graph structural features. Moreover, they model users and items in the Euclidean space, which has been demonstrated to have high distortion when modeling complex graphs, further degrading the capability to capture the graph structural features and leading to sub-optimal performance. To this end, in this paper, we propose a simple yet effective Quaternion-based Graph Convolution Network (QGCN) recommendation model. In the proposed model, we utilize the hyper-complex Quaternion space to learn user and item representations and feature transformation to improve both performance and robustness. Specifically, we first embed all users and items into the Quaternion space. Then, we introduce the quaternion embedding propagation layers with quaternion feature transformation to perform message propagation. Finally, we combine the embeddings generated at each layer with the mean pooling strategy to obtain the final embeddings for recommendation. Extensive experiments on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed QGCN model outperforms baseline methods by a large margin.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2020

Coarse to Fine: Multi-label Image Classification with Global/Local Attention

In our daily life, the scenes around us are always with multiple labels especially in a smart city, i.e., recognizing the information of city operation to response and control. Great efforts have been made by using Deep Neural Networks to recognize multi-label images. Since multi-label image classification is very complicated, people seek to use the attention mechanism to guide the classification process. However, conventional attention-based methods always analyzed images directly and aggressively. It is difficult for them to well understand complicated scenes. In this paper, we propose a global/local attention method that can recognize an image from coarse to fine by mimicking how human-beings observe images. Specifically, our global/local attention method first concentrates on the whole image, and then focuses on local specific objects in the image. We also propose a joint max-margin objective function, which enforces that the minimum score of positive labels should be larger than the maximum score of negative labels horizontally and vertically. This function can further improve our multi-label image classification method. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method on two popular multi-label image datasets (i.e., Pascal VOC and MS-COCO). Our experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

A Novel DDoS Attack Detection Method Using Optimized Generalized Multiple Kernel Learning

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack has become one of the most destructive network attacks which can pose a mortal threat to Internet security. Existing detection methods can not effectively detect early attacks. In this paper, we propose a detection method of DDoS attacks based on generalized multiple kernel learning (GMKL) combining with the constructed parameter R. The super-fusion feature value (SFV) and comprehensive degree of feature (CDF) are defined to describe the characteristic of attack flow and normal flow. A method for calculating R based on SFV and CDF is proposed to select the combination of kernel function and regularization paradigm. A DDoS attack detection classifier is generated by using the trained GMKL model with R parameter. The experimental results show that kernel function and regularization parameter selection method based on R parameter reduce the randomness of parameter selection and the error of model detection, and the proposed method can effectively detect DDoS attacks in complex environments with higher detection rate and lower error rate.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2019

Deep Cross Networks with Aesthetic Preference for Cross-domain Recommendation

When purchasing appearance-first products, e.g., clothes, product appearance aesthetics plays an important role in the decision process. Moreover, user's aesthetic preference, which can be regarded as a personality trait and a basic requirement, is domain independent and could be used as a bridge between domains for knowledge transfer. However, existing work has rarely considered the aesthetic information in product photos for cross-domain recommendation. To this end, in this paper, we propose a new deep Aesthetic preference Cross-Domain Network (ACDN), in which parameters characterizing personal aesthetic preferences are shared across networks to transfer knowledge between domains. Specifically, we first leverage an aesthetic network to extract relevant features. Then, we integrate the aesthetic features into a cross-domain network to transfer users' domain independent aesthetic preferences. Moreover, network cross-connections are introduced to enable dual knowledge transfer across domains. Finally, the experimental results on real-world data show that our proposed ACDN outperforms other benchmark methods in terms of recommendation accuracy. The results also show that users' aesthetic preferences are effective in alleviating the data sparsity issue on the cross-domain recommendation.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2019

Adaptive DDoS attack detection method based on multiple-kernel learning

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have caused huge economic losses to society. They have become one of the main threats to Internet security. Most of the current detection methods based on a single feature and fixed model parameters cannot effectively detect early DDoS attacks in cloud and big data environment. In this paper, an adaptive DDoS attack detection method (ADADM) based on multiple kernel learning (MKL) is proposed. Based on the burstiness of DDoS attack flow, the distribution of addresses and the interactivity of communication, we define five features to describe the network flow characteristic. Based on the ensemble learning framework, the weight of each dimension is adaptively adjusted by increasing the inter-class mean with a gradient ascent and reducing the intra-class variance with a gradient descent, and the classifier is established to identify an early DDoS attack by training simple multiple kernel learning (SMKL) models with two characteristics including inter-class mean squared difference growth (M-SMKL) and intra-class variance descent (S-SMKL). The sliding window mechanism is used to coordinate the S-SMKL and M-SMKL to detect the early DDoS attack. The experimental results indicate that this method can detect DDoS attacks early and accurately.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2018

Where to Go Next: A Spatio-temporal LSTM model for Next POI Recommendation

Next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation is of great value for both location-based service providers and users. Recently Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been proved to be effective on sequential recommendation tasks. However, existing RNN solutions rarely consider the spatio-temporal intervals between neighbor check-ins, which are essential for modeling user check-in behaviors in next POI recommendation. In this paper, we propose a new variant of LSTM, named STLSTM, which implements time gates and distance gates into LSTM to capture the spatio-temporal relation between successive check-ins. Specifically, one-time gate and one distance gate are designed to control short-term interest update, and another time gate and distance gate are designed to control long-term interest update. Furthermore, to reduce the number of parameters and improve efficiency, we further integrate coupled input and forget gates with our proposed model. Finally, we evaluate the proposed model using four real-world datasets from various location-based social networks. Our experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches for next POI recommendation.

cs.IR↗