arXiv subjects

Xuesong Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Xuesong Chen.

24 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Towards a Better Understanding Human Reading Comprehension with Brain Signals

Reading comprehension is a complex cognitive process involving many human brain activities. Plenty of works have studied the patterns and attention allocations of reading comprehension in information retrieval related scenarios. However, little is known about what happens in human brain during reading comprehension and how these cognitive activities can affect information retrieval process. Additionally, with the advances in brain imaging techniques such as electroencephalogram (EEG), it is possible to collect brain signals in almost real time and explore whether it can be utilized as feedback to facilitate information acquisition performance. In this paper, we carefully design a lab-based user study to investigate brain activities during reading comprehension. Our findings show that neural responses vary with different types of reading contents, i.e., contents that can satisfy users' information needs and contents that cannot. We suggest that various cognitive activities, e.g., cognitive loading, semantic-thematic understanding, and inferential processing, underpin these neural responses at the micro-time scale during reading comprehension. From these findings, we illustrate several insights for information retrieval tasks, such as ranking models construction and interface design. Besides, we suggest the possibility of detecting reading comprehension status for a proactive real-world system. To this end, we propose a Unified framework for EEG-based Reading Comprehension Modeling (UERCM). To verify its effectiveness, we conduct extensive experiments based on EEG features for two reading comprehension tasks: answer sentence classification and answer extraction. Results show that it is feasible to improve the performance of two tasks with brain signals.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2022

Brain Topography Adaptive Network for Satisfaction Modeling in Interactive Information Access System

With the growth of information on the Web, most users heavily rely on information access systems (e.g., search engines, recommender systems, etc.) in their daily lives. During this procedure, modeling users' satisfaction status plays an essential part in improving their experiences with the systems. In this paper, we aim to explore the benefits of using Electroencephalography (EEG) signals for satisfaction modeling in interactive information access system design. Different from existing EEG classification tasks, the arisen of satisfaction involves multiple brain functions, such as arousal, prototypicality, and appraisals, which are related to different brain topographical areas. Thus modeling user satisfaction raises great challenges to existing solutions. To address this challenge, we propose BTA, a Brain Topography Adaptive network with a multi-centrality encoding module and a spatial attention mechanism module to capture cognitive connectivities in different spatial distances. We explore the effectiveness of BTA for satisfaction modeling in two popular information access scenarios, i.e., search and recommendation. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets verify the effectiveness of introducing brain topography adaptive strategy in satisfaction modeling. Furthermore, we also conduct search result re-ranking task and video rating prediction task based on the satisfaction inferred from brain signals on search and recommendation scenarios, respectively. Experimental results show that brain signals extracted with BTA help improve the performance of interactive information access systems significantly.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

Random Telegraph Noise of a 28-nm Cryogenic MOSFET in the Coulomb Blockade Regime

We observe rich phenomena of two-level random telegraph noise (RTN) from a commercial bulk 28-nm p-MOSFET (PMOS) near threshold at 14 K, where a Coulomb blockade (CB) hump arises from a quantum dot (QD) formed in the channel. Minimum RTN is observed at the CB hump where the high-current RTN level dramatically switches to the low-current level. The gate-voltage dependence of the RTN amplitude and power spectral density match well with the transconductance from the DC transfer curve in the CB hump region. Our work unequivocally captures these QD transport signatures in both current and noise, revealing quantum confinement effects in commercial short-channel PMOS even at 14 K, over 100 times higher than the typical dilution refrigerator temperatures of QD experiments (<100 mK). We envision that our reported RTN characteristics rooted from the QD and a defect trap would be more prominent for smaller technology nodes, where the quantum effect should be carefully examined in cryogenic CMOS circuit designs.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2021

Web Search via an Efficient and Effective Brain-Machine Interface

While search technologies have evolved to be robust and ubiquitous, the fundamental interaction paradigm has remained relatively stable for decades. With the maturity of the Brain-Machine Interface, we build an efficient and effective communication system between human beings and search engines based on electroencephalogram(EEG) signals, called Brain-Machine Search Interface(BMSI) system. The BMSI system provides functions including query reformulation and search result interaction. In our system, users can perform search tasks without having to use the mouse and keyboard. Therefore, it is useful for application scenarios in which hand-based interactions are infeasible, e.g, for users with severe neuromuscular disorders. Besides, based on brain signals decoding, our system can provide abundant and valuable user-side context information(e.g., real-time satisfaction feedback, extensive context information, and a clearer description of information needs) to the search engine, which is hard to capture in the previous paradigm. In our implementation, the system can decode user satisfaction from brain signals in real-time during the interaction process and re-rank the search results list based on user satisfaction feedback. The demo video is available at http://www.thuir.cn/group/YQLiu/datasets/BMSISystem.mp4.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

Why Don't You Click: Neural Correlates of Non-Click Behaviors in Web Search

Web search heavily relies on click-through behavior as an essential feedback signal for performance improvement and evaluation. Traditionally, click is usually treated as a positive implicit feedback signal of relevance or usefulness, while non-click (especially non-click after examination) is regarded as a signal of irrelevance or uselessness. However, there are many cases where users do not click on any search results but still satisfy their information need with the contents of the results shown on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). This raises the problem of measuring result usefulness and modeling user satisfaction in "Zero-click" search scenarios. Previous works have solved this issue by (1) detecting user satisfaction for abandoned SERP with context information and (2) considering result-level click necessity with external assessors' annotations. However, few works have investigated the reason behind non-click behavior and estimated the usefulness of non-click results. A challenge for this research question is how to collect valuable feedback for non-click results. With neuroimaging technologies, we design a lab-based user study and reveal differences in brain signals while examining non-click search results with different usefulness levels. The findings in significant brain regions and electroencephalogram~(EEG) spectrum also suggest that the process of usefulness judgment might involve similar cognitive functions of relevance perception and satisfaction decoding. Inspired by these findings, we conduct supervised learning tasks to estimate the usefulness of non-click results with brain signals and conventional information (i.e., content and context factors). Results show that it is feasible to utilize brain signals to improve usefulness estimation performance and enhancing human-computer interactions in "Zero-click" search scenarios.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

Semantic Scene Completion via Integrating Instances and Scene in-the-Loop

Semantic Scene Completion aims at reconstructing a complete 3D scene with precise voxel-wise semantics from a single-view depth or RGBD image. It is a crucial but challenging problem for indoor scene understanding. In this work, we present a novel framework named Scene-Instance-Scene Network (\textit{SISNet}), which takes advantages of both instance and scene level semantic information. Our method is capable of inferring fine-grained shape details as well as nearby objects whose semantic categories are easily mixed-up. The key insight is that we decouple the instances from a coarsely completed semantic scene instead of a raw input image to guide the reconstruction of instances and the overall scene. SISNet conducts iterative scene-to-instance (SI) and instance-to-scene (IS) semantic completion. Specifically, the SI is able to encode objects' surrounding context for effectively decoupling instances from the scene and each instance could be voxelized into higher resolution to capture finer details. With IS, fine-grained instance information can be integrated back into the 3D scene and thus leads to more accurate semantic scene completion. Utilizing such an iterative mechanism, the scene and instance completion benefits each other to achieve higher completion accuracy. Extensively experiments show that our proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both real NYU, NYUCAD and synthetic SUNCG-RGBD datasets. The code and the supplementary material will be available at \url{https://github.com/yjcaimeow/SISNet}.

cs.CV↗