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Yan Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Yan Wang.

At least 631 records · Page 35Linked to original sources
arXiv2023

Producer-Side Experiments Based on Counterfactual Interleaving Designs for Online Recommender Systems

Recommender systems have become an integral part of online platforms, providing personalized recommendations for purchases, content consumption, and interpersonal connections. These systems consist of two sides: the producer side comprises product sellers, content creators, or service providers, etc., and the consumer side includes buyers, viewers, or customers, etc. To optimize online recommender systems, A/B tests serve as the golden standard for comparing different ranking models and evaluating their impact on both the consumers and producers. While consumer-side experiments is relatively straightforward to design and commonly employed to assess the impact of ranking changes on the behavior of consumers (buyers, viewers, etc.), designing producer-side experiments for an online recommender/ranking system is notably more intricate because producer items in the treatment and control groups need to be ranked by different models and then merged into a unified ranking to be presented to each consumer. Current design solutions in the literature are ad hoc and lacking rigorous guiding principles. In this paper, we examine limitations of these existing methods and propose the principle of consistency and principle of monotonicity for designing producer-side experiments of online recommender systems. Building upon these principles, we also present a systematic solution based on counterfactual interleaving designs to accurately measure the impacts of ranking changes on the producers (sellers, creators, etc.).

stat.ME↗
arXiv2023

FVP: Fourier Visual Prompting for Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image segmentation methods normally perform poorly when there is a domain shift between training and testing data. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) addresses the domain shift problem by training the model using both labeled data from the source domain and unlabeled data from the target domain. Source-Free UDA (SFUDA) was recently proposed for UDA without requiring the source data during the adaptation, due to data privacy or data transmission issues, which normally adapts the pre-trained deep model in the testing stage. However, in real clinical scenarios of medical image segmentation, the trained model is normally frozen in the testing stage. In this paper, we propose Fourier Visual Prompting (FVP) for SFUDA of medical image segmentation. Inspired by prompting learning in natural language processing, FVP steers the frozen pre-trained model to perform well in the target domain by adding a visual prompt to the input target data. In FVP, the visual prompt is parameterized using only a small amount of low-frequency learnable parameters in the input frequency space, and is learned by minimizing the segmentation loss between the predicted segmentation of the prompted target image and reliable pseudo segmentation label of the target image under the frozen model. To our knowledge, FVP is the first work to apply visual prompts to SFUDA for medical image segmentation. The proposed FVP is validated using three public datasets, and experiments demonstrate that FVP yields better segmentation results, compared with various existing methods.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Predictive Control for Autonomous Driving with Uncertain, Multi-modal Predictions

We propose a Stochastic MPC (SMPC) formulation for path planning with autonomous vehicles in scenarios involving multiple agents with multi-modal predictions. The multi-modal predictions capture the uncertainty of urban driving in distinct modes/maneuvers (e.g., yield, keep speed) and driving trajectories (e.g., speed, turning radius), which are incorporated for multi-modal collision avoidance chance constraints for path planning. In the presence of multi-modal uncertainties, it is challenging to reliably compute feasible path planning solutions at real-time frequencies ($\geq$ 10 Hz). Our main technological contribution is a convex SMPC formulation that simultaneously (1) optimizes over parameterized feedback policies and (2) allocates risk levels for each mode of the prediction. The use of feedback policies and risk allocation enhances the feasibility and performance of the SMPC formulation against multi-modal predictions with large uncertainty. We evaluate our approach via simulations and road experiments with a full-scale vehicle interacting in closed-loop with virtual vehicles. We consider distinct, multi-modal driving scenarios: 1) Negotiating a traffic light and a fast, tailgating agent, 2) Executing an unprotected left turn at a traffic intersection, and 3) Changing lanes in the presence of multiple agents. For all of these scenarios, our approach reliably computes multi-modal solutions to the path-planning problem at real-time frequencies.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2023

Stability of Random Forests and Coverage of Random-Forest Prediction Intervals

We establish stability of random forests under the mild condition that the squared response ($Y^2$) does not have a heavy tail. In particular, our analysis holds for the practical version of random forests that is implemented in popular packages like \texttt{randomForest} in \texttt{R}. Empirical results show that stability may persist even beyond our assumption and hold for heavy-tailed $Y^2$. Using the stability property, we prove a non-asymptotic lower bound for the coverage probability of prediction intervals constructed from the out-of-bag error of random forests. With another mild condition that is typically satisfied when $Y$ is continuous, we also establish a complementary upper bound, which can be similarly established for the jackknife prediction interval constructed from an arbitrary stable algorithm. We also discuss the asymptotic coverage probability under assumptions weaker than those considered in previous literature. Our work implies that random forests, with its stability property, is an effective machine learning method that can provide not only satisfactory point prediction but also justified interval prediction at almost no extra computational cost.

stat.ML↗
arXiv2023

Quantum Approximate Bayesian Optimization Algorithms with Two Mixers and Uncertainty Quantification

The searching efficiency of the quantum approximate optimization algorithm is dependent on both the classical and quantum sides of the algorithm. Recently a quantum approximate Bayesian optimization algorithm (QABOA) that includes two mixers was developed, where surrogate-based Bayesian optimization is applied to improve the sampling efficiency of the classical optimizer. A continuous-time quantum walk mixer is used to enhance exploration, and the generalized Grover mixer is also applied to improve exploitation. In this paper, an extension of QABOA is proposed to further improve its searching efficiency. The searching efficiency is enhanced through two aspects. First, two mixers, including one for exploration and the other for exploitation, are applied in an alternating fashion. Second, uncertainty of the quantum circuit is quantified with a new quantum Matérn kernel based on the kurtosis of the basis state distribution, which increases the chance of obtaining the optimum. The proposed new two-mixer QABOA$'$s with and without uncertainty quantification are compared with three single-mixer QABOA$'$s on five discrete and four mixed-integer problems. The results show that the proposed two-mixer QABOA with uncertainty quantification has the best performance in efficiency and consistency for five out of the nine tested problems. The results also show that QABOA with the generalized Grover mixer performs the best among the single-mixer algorithms, thereby demonstrating the benefit of exploitation and the importance of dynamic exploration-exploitation balance in improving searching efficiency.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2023

Temporal Convolutional Attention-based Network For Sequence Modeling

With the development of feed-forward models, the default model for sequence modeling has gradually evolved to replace recurrent networks. Many powerful feed-forward models based on convolutional networks and attention mechanism were proposed and show more potential to handle sequence modeling tasks. We wonder that is there an architecture that can not only achieve an approximate substitution of recurrent network, but also absorb the advantages of feed-forward models. So we propose an exploratory architecture referred to Temporal Convolutional Attention-based Network (TCAN) which combines temporal convolutional network and attention mechanism. TCAN includes two parts, one is Temporal Attention (TA) which captures relevant features inside the sequence, the other is Enhanced Residual (ER) which extracts shallow layer's important information and transfers to deep layers. We improve the state-of-the-art results of bpc/perplexity to 30.28 on word-level PTB, 1.092 on character-level PTB, and 9.20 on WikiText-2.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2023

Towards End-to-End Unsupervised Saliency Detection with Self-Supervised Top-Down Context

Unsupervised salient object detection aims to detect salient objects without using supervision signals eliminating the tedious task of manually labeling salient objects. To improve training efficiency, end-to-end methods for USOD have been proposed as a promising alternative. However, current solutions rely heavily on noisy handcraft labels and fail to mine rich semantic information from deep features. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised end-to-end salient object detection framework via top-down context. Specifically, motivated by contrastive learning, we exploit the self-localization from the deepest feature to construct the location maps which are then leveraged to learn the most instructive segmentation guidance. Further considering the lack of detailed information in deepest features, we exploit the detail-boosting refiner module to enrich the location labels with details. Moreover, we observe that due to lack of supervision, current unsupervised saliency models tend to detect non-salient objects that are salient in some other samples of corresponding scenarios. To address this widespread issue, we design a novel Unsupervised Non-Salient Suppression (UNSS) method developing the ability to ignore non-salient objects. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves leading performance among the recent end-to-end methods and most of the multi-stage solutions. The code is available.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Rainbow clique subdivisions

We show that for any integer $t \ge 2$, every properly edge colored $n$-vertex graph with average degree at least $(\log n)^{2+o(1)}$ contains a rainbow subdivision of a complete graph of size $t$. Note that this bound is within $(\log n)^{1+o(1)}$ factor of the lower bound. This also implies a result on the rainbow Turán number of cycles.

math.CO↗
arXiv2023

Prompt-augmented Temporal Point Process for Streaming Event Sequence

Neural Temporal Point Processes (TPPs) are the prevalent paradigm for modeling continuous-time event sequences, such as user activities on the web and financial transactions. In real-world applications, event data is typically received in a \emph{streaming} manner, where the distribution of patterns may shift over time. Additionally, \emph{privacy and memory constraints} are commonly observed in practical scenarios, further compounding the challenges. Therefore, the continuous monitoring of a TPP to learn the streaming event sequence is an important yet under-explored problem. Our work paper addresses this challenge by adopting Continual Learning (CL), which makes the model capable of continuously learning a sequence of tasks without catastrophic forgetting under realistic constraints. Correspondingly, we propose a simple yet effective framework, PromptTPP\footnote{Our code is available at {\small \url{ https://github.com/yanyanSann/PromptTPP}}}, by integrating the base TPP with a continuous-time retrieval prompt pool. The prompts, small learnable parameters, are stored in a memory space and jointly optimized with the base TPP, ensuring that the model learns event streams sequentially without buffering past examples or task-specific attributes. We present a novel and realistic experimental setup for modeling event streams, where PromptTPP consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across three real user behavior datasets.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

Waymax: An Accelerated, Data-Driven Simulator for Large-Scale Autonomous Driving Research

Simulation is an essential tool to develop and benchmark autonomous vehicle planning software in a safe and cost-effective manner. However, realistic simulation requires accurate modeling of nuanced and complex multi-agent interactive behaviors. To address these challenges, we introduce Waymax, a new data-driven simulator for autonomous driving in multi-agent scenes, designed for large-scale simulation and testing. Waymax uses publicly-released, real-world driving data (e.g., the Waymo Open Motion Dataset) to initialize or play back a diverse set of multi-agent simulated scenarios. It runs entirely on hardware accelerators such as TPUs/GPUs and supports in-graph simulation for training, making it suitable for modern large-scale, distributed machine learning workflows. To support online training and evaluation, Waymax includes several learned and hard-coded behavior models that allow for realistic interaction within simulation. To supplement Waymax, we benchmark a suite of popular imitation and reinforcement learning algorithms with ablation studies on different design decisions, where we highlight the effectiveness of routes as guidance for planning agents and the ability of RL to overfit against simulated agents.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2023

3D TransUNet: Advancing Medical Image Segmentation through Vision Transformers

Medical image segmentation plays a crucial role in advancing healthcare systems for disease diagnosis and treatment planning. The u-shaped architecture, popularly known as U-Net, has proven highly successful for various medical image segmentation tasks. However, U-Net's convolution-based operations inherently limit its ability to model long-range dependencies effectively. To address these limitations, researchers have turned to Transformers, renowned for their global self-attention mechanisms, as alternative architectures. One popular network is our previous TransUNet, which leverages Transformers' self-attention to complement U-Net's localized information with the global context. In this paper, we extend the 2D TransUNet architecture to a 3D network by building upon the state-of-the-art nnU-Net architecture, and fully exploring Transformers' potential in both the encoder and decoder design. We introduce two key components: 1) A Transformer encoder that tokenizes image patches from a convolution neural network (CNN) feature map, enabling the extraction of global contexts, and 2) A Transformer decoder that adaptively refines candidate regions by utilizing cross-attention between candidate proposals and U-Net features. Our investigations reveal that different medical tasks benefit from distinct architectural designs. The Transformer encoder excels in multi-organ segmentation, where the relationship among organs is crucial. On the other hand, the Transformer decoder proves more beneficial for dealing with small and challenging segmented targets such as tumor segmentation. Extensive experiments showcase the significant potential of integrating a Transformer-based encoder and decoder into the u-shaped medical image segmentation architecture. TransUNet outperforms competitors in various medical applications.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Large Language Models Meet Harry Potter: A Bilingual Dataset for Aligning Dialogue Agents with Characters

In recent years, Dialogue-style Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and GPT4 have demonstrated immense potential in constructing open-domain dialogue agents. However, aligning these agents with specific characters or individuals remains a considerable challenge due to the complexities of character representation and the lack of comprehensive annotations. In this paper, we introduce the Harry Potter Dialogue (HPD) dataset, designed to advance the study of dialogue agents and character alignment. The dataset encompasses all dialogue sessions (in both English and Chinese) from the Harry Potter series and is annotated with vital background information, including dialogue scenes, speakers, character relationships, and attributes. These extensive annotations may empower LLMs to unlock character-driven dialogue capabilities. Furthermore, it can serve as a universal benchmark for evaluating how well can a LLM aligning with a specific character. We benchmark LLMs on HPD using both fine-tuning and in-context learning settings. Evaluation results reveal that although there is substantial room for improvement in generating high-quality, character-aligned responses, the proposed dataset is valuable in guiding models toward responses that better align with the character of Harry Potter.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2023

Enhancing Asynchronous Time Series Forecasting with Contrastive Relational Inference

Asynchronous time series, also known as temporal event sequences, are the basis of many applications throughout different industries. Temporal point processes(TPPs) are the standard method for modeling such data. Existing TPP models have focused on parameterizing the conditional distribution of future events instead of explicitly modeling event interactions, imposing challenges for event predictions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that leverages Neural Relational Inference (NRI) to learn a relation graph that infers interactions while simultaneously learning the dynamics patterns from observational data. Our approach, the Contrastive Relational Inference-based Hawkes Process (CRIHP), reasons about event interactions under a variational inference framework. It utilizes intensity-based learning to search for prototype paths to contrast relationship constraints. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in capturing event interactions for event sequence modeling tasks. Code will be integrated into the EasyTPP framework.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

Kairos: Practical Intrusion Detection and Investigation using Whole-system Provenance

Provenance graphs are structured audit logs that describe the history of a system's execution. Recent studies have explored a variety of techniques to analyze provenance graphs for automated host intrusion detection, focusing particularly on advanced persistent threats. Sifting through their design documents, we identify four common dimensions that drive the development of provenance-based intrusion detection systems (PIDSes): scope (can PIDSes detect modern attacks that infiltrate across application boundaries?), attack agnosticity (can PIDSes detect novel attacks without a priori knowledge of attack characteristics?), timeliness (can PIDSes efficiently monitor host systems as they run?), and attack reconstruction (can PIDSes distill attack activity from large provenance graphs so that sysadmins can easily understand and quickly respond to system intrusion?). We present KAIROS, the first PIDS that simultaneously satisfies the desiderata in all four dimensions, whereas existing approaches sacrifice at least one and struggle to achieve comparable detection performance. Kairos leverages a novel graph neural network-based encoder-decoder architecture that learns the temporal evolution of a provenance graph's structural changes to quantify the degree of anomalousness for each system event. Then, based on this fine-grained information, Kairos reconstructs attack footprints, generating compact summary graphs that accurately describe malicious activity over a stream of system audit logs. Using state-of-the-art benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that Kairos outperforms previous approaches.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2023

SpiderMesh: Spatial-aware Demand-guided Recursive Meshing for RGB-T Semantic Segmentation

For semantic segmentation in urban scene understanding, RGB cameras alone often fail to capture a clear holistic topology in challenging lighting conditions. Thermal signal is an informative additional channel that can bring to light the contour and fine-grained texture of blurred regions in low-quality RGB image. Aiming at practical RGB-T (thermal) segmentation, we systematically propose a Spatial-aware Demand-guided Recursive Meshing (SpiderMesh) framework that: 1) proactively compensates inadequate contextual semantics in optically-impaired regions via a demand-guided target masking algorithm; 2) refines multimodal semantic features with recursive meshing to improve pixel-level semantic analysis performance. We further introduce an asymmetric data augmentation technique M-CutOut, and enable semi-supervised learning to fully utilize RGB-T labels only sparsely available in practical use. Extensive experiments on MFNet and PST900 datasets demonstrate that SpiderMesh achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard RGB-T segmentation benchmarks.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Uncertainty Quantification in Machine Learning for Engineering Design and Health Prognostics: A Tutorial

On top of machine learning models, uncertainty quantification (UQ) functions as an essential layer of safety assurance that could lead to more principled decision making by enabling sound risk assessment and management. The safety and reliability improvement of ML models empowered by UQ has the potential to significantly facilitate the broad adoption of ML solutions in high-stakes decision settings, such as healthcare, manufacturing, and aviation, to name a few. In this tutorial, we aim to provide a holistic lens on emerging UQ methods for ML models with a particular focus on neural networks and the applications of these UQ methods in tackling engineering design as well as prognostics and health management problems. Toward this goal, we start with a comprehensive classification of uncertainty types, sources, and causes pertaining to UQ of ML models. Next, we provide a tutorial-style description of several state-of-the-art UQ methods: Gaussian process regression, Bayesian neural network, neural network ensemble, and deterministic UQ methods focusing on spectral-normalized neural Gaussian process. Established upon the mathematical formulations, we subsequently examine the soundness of these UQ methods quantitatively and qualitatively (by a toy regression example) to examine their strengths and shortcomings from different dimensions. Then, we review quantitative metrics commonly used to assess the quality of predictive uncertainty in classification and regression problems. Afterward, we discuss the increasingly important role of UQ of ML models in solving challenging problems in engineering design and health prognostics. Two case studies with source codes available on GitHub are used to demonstrate these UQ methods and compare their performance in the life prediction of lithium-ion batteries at the early stage and the remaining useful life prediction of turbofan engines.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

Effects of spin-orbit coupling on gravitational waveforms from a triaxial non-aligned neutron star in a binary system

Spinning neutron stars (NSs) can emit continuous gravitational waves (GWs) that carry a wealth of information about the compact object. If such a signal is detected, it will provide us with new insight into the physical properties of matter under extreme conditions. Future space-based GW detectors, such as LISA and TianQin, can potentially detect some double NSs in tight binaries with orbital periods shorter than 10 minutes. The possibility of a successful directed search for continuous GWs from the spinning NS in such a binary system identified by LISA/TianQin will be significantly increased with the proposed next-generation ground-based GW observatories, such as Cosmic Explorer and Einstein Telescope. Searching for continuous GWs from such a tight binary system requires highly accurate waveform templates that account for the interaction of the NS with its companion. In this spirit, we derive analytic approximations that describe the GWs emitted by a triaxial non-aligned NS in a binary system in which the effects of spin-orbit coupling have been incorporated. The difference with the widely used waveform for the isolated NS is estimated and the parameter estimation accuracy of an example signal using Cosmic Explorer is calculated. For a typical tight double NS system with a 6~min orbital period, the angular frequency correction of the spinning NS in this binary due to spin precession is $\sim 10^{-6}~{\rm Hz}$, which is in the same order of magnitude as the angular frequency of orbital precession. The fitting factor between the waveforms with and without spin precession will drop to less than 0.97 after a few days ($\sim 10^5~{\rm s}$). We find that spin-orbit coupling has the potential to improve the accuracy of parameter estimation, especially for the binary inclination angle and spin precession cone opening angle, by up to 3 orders of magnitude. (Abridged)

gr-qc↗
arXiv2023

Bandwidth-efficient Inference for Neural Image Compression

With neural networks growing deeper and feature maps growing larger, limited communication bandwidth with external memory (or DRAM) and power constraints become a bottleneck in implementing network inference on mobile and edge devices. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end differentiable bandwidth efficient neural inference method with the activation compressed by neural data compression method. Specifically, we propose a transform-quantization-entropy coding pipeline for activation compression with symmetric exponential Golomb coding and a data-dependent Gaussian entropy model for arithmetic coding. Optimized with existing model quantization methods, low-level task of image compression can achieve up to 19x bandwidth reduction with 6.21x energy saving.

cs.CV↗