arXiv subjects

Yunjun Gao

Publications and source records attributed to Yunjun Gao.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Towards Explainable Collaborative Filtering with Taste Clusters Learning

Collaborative Filtering (CF) is a widely used and effective technique for recommender systems. In recent decades, there have been significant advancements in latent embedding-based CF methods for improved accuracy, such as matrix factorization, neural collaborative filtering, and LightGCN. However, the explainability of these models has not been fully explored. Adding explainability to recommendation models can not only increase trust in the decisionmaking process, but also have multiple benefits such as providing persuasive explanations for item recommendations, creating explicit profiles for users and items, and assisting item producers in design improvements. In this paper, we propose a neat and effective Explainable Collaborative Filtering (ECF) model that leverages interpretable cluster learning to achieve the two most demanding objectives: (1) Precise - the model should not compromise accuracy in the pursuit of explainability; and (2) Self-explainable - the model's explanations should truly reflect its decision-making process, not generated from post-hoc methods. The core of ECF is mining taste clusters from user-item interactions and item profiles.We map each user and item to a sparse set of taste clusters, and taste clusters are distinguished by a few representative tags. The user-item preference, users/items' cluster affiliations, and the generation of taste clusters are jointly optimized in an end-to-end manner. Additionally, we introduce a forest mechanism to ensure the model's accuracy, explainability, and diversity. To comprehensively evaluate the explainability quality of taste clusters, we design several quantitative metrics, including in-cluster item coverage, tag utilization, silhouette, and informativeness. Our model's effectiveness is demonstrated through extensive experiments on three real-world datasets.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2023

SEA: A Scalable Entity Alignment System

Entity alignment (EA) aims to find equivalent entities in different knowledge graphs (KGs). State-of-the-art EA approaches generally use Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to encode entities. However, most of them train the models and evaluate the results in a fullbatch fashion, which prohibits EA from being scalable on largescale datasets. To enhance the usability of GNN-based EA models in real-world applications, we present SEA, a scalable entity alignment system that enables to (i) train large-scale GNNs for EA, (ii) speed up the normalization and the evaluation process, and (iii) report clear results for users to estimate different models and parameter settings. SEA can be run on a computer with merely one graphic card. Moreover, SEA encompasses six state-of-the-art EA models and provides access for users to quickly establish and evaluate their own models. Thus, SEA allows users to perform EA without being involved in tedious implementations, such as negative sampling and GPU-accelerated evaluation. With SEA, users can gain a clear view of the model performance. In the demonstration, we show that SEA is user-friendly and is of high scalability even on computers with limited computational resources.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Spatio-Temporal Trajectory Similarity Measures: A Comprehensive Survey and Quantitative Study

Spatio-temporal trajectory analytics is at the core of smart mobility solutions, which offers unprecedented information for diversified applications such as urban planning, infrastructure development, and vehicular networks. Trajectory similarity measure, which aims to evaluate the distance between two trajectories, is a fundamental functionality of trajectory analytics. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive survey that investigates all the most common and representative spatio-temporal trajectory measures. First, we provide an overview of spatio-temporal trajectory measures in terms of three hierarchical perspectives: Non-learning vs. Learning, Free Space vs. Road Network, and Standalone vs. Distributed. Next, we present an evaluation benchmark by designing five real-world transformation scenarios. Based on this benchmark, extensive experiments are conducted to study the effectiveness, robustness,nefficiency, and scalability of each measure, which offers guidelines for trajectory measure selection among multiple techniques and applications such as trajectory data mining, deep learning, and distributed processing.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2023

Unsupervised Entity Alignment for Temporal Knowledge Graphs

Entity alignment (EA) is a fundamental data integration task that identifies equivalent entities between different knowledge graphs (KGs). Temporal Knowledge graphs (TKGs) extend traditional knowledge graphs by introducing timestamps, which have received increasing attention. State-of-the-art time-aware EA studies have suggested that the temporal information of TKGs facilitates the performance of EA. However, existing studies have not thoroughly exploited the advantages of temporal information in TKGs. Also, they perform EA by pre-aligning entity pairs, which can be labor-intensive and thus inefficient. In this paper, we present DualMatch which effectively fuses the relational and temporal information for EA. DualMatch transfers EA on TKGs into a weighted graph matching problem. More specifically, DualMatch is equipped with an unsupervised method, which achieves EA without necessitating seed alignment. DualMatch has two steps: (i) encoding temporal and relational information into embeddings separately using a novel label-free encoder, Dual-Encoder; and (ii) fusing both information and transforming it into alignment using a novel graph-matching-based decoder, GM-Decoder. DualMatch is able to perform EA on TKGs with or without supervision, due to its capability of effectively capturing temporal information. Extensive experiments on three real-world TKG datasets offer the insight that DualMatch outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of H@1 by 2.4% - 10.7% and MRR by 1.7% - 7.6%, respectively.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2022

Estimator: An Effective and Scalable Framework for Transportation Mode Classification over Trajectories

Transportation mode classification, the process of predicting the class labels of moving objects transportation modes, has been widely applied to a variety of real world applications, such as traffic management, urban computing, and behavior study. However, existing studies of transportation mode classification typically extract the explicit features of trajectory data but fail to capture the implicit features that affect the classification performance. In addition, most of the existing studies also prefer to apply RNN-based models to embed trajectories, which is only suitable for classifying small-scale data. To tackle the above challenges, we propose an effective and scalable framework for transportation mode classification over GPS trajectories, abbreviated Estimator. Estimator is established on a developed CNN-TCN architecture, which is capable of leveraging the spatial and temporal hidden features of trajectories to achieve high effectiveness and efficiency. Estimator partitions the entire traffic space into disjointed spatial regions according to traffic conditions, which enhances the scalability significantly and thus enables parallel transportation classification. Extensive experiments using eight public real-life datasets offer evidence that Estimator i) achieves superior model effectiveness (i.e., 99% Accuracy and 0.98 F1-score), which outperforms state-of-the-arts substantially; ii) exhibits prominent model efficiency, and obtains 7-40x speedups up over state-of-the-arts learning-based methods; and iii) shows high model scalability and robustness that enables large-scale classification analytics.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

PromptEM: Prompt-tuning for Low-resource Generalized Entity Matching

Entity Matching (EM), which aims to identify whether two entity records from two relational tables refer to the same real-world entity, is one of the fundamental problems in data management. Traditional EM assumes that two tables are homogeneous with the aligned schema, while it is common that entity records of different formats (e.g., relational, semi-structured, or textual types) involve in practical scenarios. It is not practical to unify their schemas due to the different formats. To support EM on format-different entity records, Generalized Entity Matching (GEM) has been proposed and gained much attention recently. To do GEM, existing methods typically perform in a supervised learning way, which relies on a large amount of high-quality labeled examples. However, the labeling process is extremely labor-intensive, and frustrates the use of GEM. Low-resource GEM, i.e., GEM that only requires a small number of labeled examples, becomes an urgent need. To this end, this paper, for the first time, focuses on the low-resource GEM and proposes a novel low-resource GEM method, termed as PromptEM. PromptEM has addressed three challenging issues (i.e., designing GEM-specific prompt-tuning, improving pseudo-labels quality, and running efficient self-training) in low-resource GEM. Extensive experimental results on eight real benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of PromptEM in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2022

ClusterEA: Scalable Entity Alignment with Stochastic Training and Normalized Mini-batch Similarities

Entity alignment (EA) aims at finding equivalent entities in different knowledge graphs (KGs). Embedding-based approaches have dominated the EA task in recent years. Those methods face problems that come from the geometric properties of embedding vectors, including hubness and isolation. To solve these geometric problems, many normalization approaches have been adopted for EA. However, the increasing scale of KGs renders it hard for EA models to adopt the normalization processes, thus limiting their usage in real-world applications. To tackle this challenge, we present ClusterEA, a general framework that is capable of scaling up EA models and enhancing their results by leveraging normalization methods on mini-batches with a high entity equivalent rate. ClusterEA contains three components to align entities between large-scale KGs, including stochastic training, ClusterSampler, and SparseFusion. It first trains a large-scale Siamese GNN for EA in a stochastic fashion to produce entity embeddings. Based on the embeddings, a novel ClusterSampler strategy is proposed for sampling highly overlapped mini-batches. Finally, ClusterEA incorporates SparseFusion, which normalizes local and global similarity and then fuses all similarity matrices to obtain the final similarity matrix. Extensive experiments with real-life datasets on EA benchmarks offer insight into the proposed framework, and suggest that it is capable of outperforming the state-of-the-art scalable EA framework by up to 8 times in terms of Hits@1.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2022

Indexing Metric Spaces for Exact Similarity Search

With the continued digitization of societal processes, we are seeing an explosion in available data. This is referred to as big data. In a research setting, three aspects of the data are often viewed as the main sources of challenges when attempting to enable value creation from big data: volume, velocity, and variety. Many studies address volume or velocity, while fewer studies concern the variety. Metric spaces are ideal for addressing variety because they can accommodate any data as long as it can be equipped with a distance notion that satisfies the triangle inequality. To accelerate search in metric spaces, a collection of indexing techniques for metric data have been proposed. However, existing surveys offer limited coverage, and a comprehensive empirical study exists has yet to be reported. We offer a comprehensive survey of existing metric indexes that support exact similarity search: we summarize existing partitioning, pruning, and validation techniques used by metric indexes to support exact similarity search; we provide the time and space complexity analyses of index construction; and we offer an empirical comparison of their query processing performance. Empirical studies are important when evaluating metric indexing performance, because performance can depend highly on the effectiveness of available pruning and validation as well as on the data distribution, which means that complexity analyses often offer limited insights. This article aims at revealing strengths and weaknesses of different indexing techniques to offer guidance on selecting an appropriate indexing technique for a given setting, and to provide directions for future research on metric indexing.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2022

Self-Guided Learning to Denoise for Robust Recommendation

The ubiquity of implicit feedback makes them the default choice to build modern recommender systems. Generally speaking, observed interactions are considered as positive samples, while unobserved interactions are considered as negative ones. However, implicit feedback is inherently noisy because of the ubiquitous presence of noisy-positive and noisy-negative interactions. Recently, some studies have noticed the importance of denoising implicit feedback for recommendations, and enhanced the robustness of recommendation models to some extent. Nonetheless, they typically fail to (1) capture the hard yet clean interactions for learning comprehensive user preference, and (2) provide a universal denoising solution that can be applied to various kinds of recommendation models. In this paper, we thoroughly investigate the memorization effect of recommendation models, and propose a new denoising paradigm, i.e., Self-Guided Denoising Learning (SGDL), which is able to collect memorized interactions at the early stage of the training (i.e., "noise-resistant" period), and leverage those data as denoising signals to guide the following training (i.e., "noise-sensitive" period) of the model in a meta-learning manner. Besides, our method can automatically switch its learning phase at the memorization point from memorization to self-guided learning, and select clean and informative memorized data via a novel adaptive denoising scheduler to improve the robustness. We incorporate SGDL with four representative recommendation models (i.e., NeuMF, CDAE, NGCF and LightGCN) and different loss functions (i.e., binary cross-entropy and BPR loss). The experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SGDL over the state-of-the-art denoising methods like T-CE, IR, DeCA, and even state-of-the-art robust graph-based methods like SGCN and SGL.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2022

Maximizing the Influence of Bichromatic Reverse k Nearest Neighbors in Geo-Social Networks

Geo-social networks offer opportunities for the marketing and promotion of geo-located services. In this setting, we explore a new problem, called Maximizing the Influence of Bichromatic Reverse k Nearest Neighbors (MaxInfBRkNN). The objective is to find a set of points of interest (POIs), which are geo-textually and socially attractive to social influencers who are expected to largely promote the POIs through online influence propagation. In other words, the problem aims to detect an optimal set of POIs with the largest word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing potential. This functionality is useful in various real-life applications, including social advertising, location-based viral marketing, and personalized POI recommendation. However, solving MaxInfBRkNN with theoretical guarantees is challenging, because of the prohibitive overheads on BRkNN retrieval in geo-social networks, and the NP and #P-hardness in finding the optimal POI set. To achieve practical solutions, we present a framework with carefully designed indexes, efficient batch BRkNN processing algorithms, and alternative POI selection policies that support both approximate and heuristic solutions. Extensive experiments on real and synthetic datasets demonstrate the good performance of our proposed methods.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2022

MetaKG: Meta-learning on Knowledge Graph for Cold-start Recommendation

A knowledge graph (KG) consists of a set of interconnected typed entities and their attributes. Recently, KGs are popularly used as the auxiliary information to enable more accurate, explainable, and diverse user preference recommendations. Specifically, existing KG-based recommendation methods target modeling high-order relations/dependencies from long connectivity user-item interactions hidden in KG. However, most of them ignore the cold-start problems (i.e., user cold-start and item cold-start) of recommendation analytics, which restricts their performance in scenarios when involving new users or new items. Inspired by the success of meta-learning on scarce training samples, we propose a novel meta-learning based framework called MetaKG, which encompasses a collaborative-aware meta learner and a knowledge-aware meta learner, to capture meta users' preference and entities' knowledge for cold-start recommendations. The collaborative-aware meta learner aims to locally aggregate user preferences for each user preference learning task. In contrast, the knowledge-aware meta learner is to globally generalize knowledge representation across different user preference learning tasks. Guided by two meta learners, MetaKG can effectively capture the high-order collaborative relations and semantic representations, which could be easily adapted to cold-start scenarios. Besides, we devise a novel adaptive task scheduler which can adaptively select the informative tasks for meta learning in order to prevent the model from being corrupted by noisy tasks. Extensive experiments on various cold-start scenarios using three real data sets demonstrate that our presented MetaKG outperforms all the existing state-of-the-art competitors in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2022

HAKG: Hierarchy-Aware Knowledge Gated Network for Recommendation

Knowledge graph (KG) plays an increasingly important role to improve the recommendation performance and interpretability. A recent technical trend is to design end-to-end models based on information propagation schemes. However, existing propagation-based methods fail to (1) model the underlying hierarchical structures and relations, and (2) capture the high-order collaborative signals of items for learning high-quality user and item representations. In this paper, we propose a new model, called Hierarchy-Aware Knowledge Gated Network (HAKG), to tackle the aforementioned problems. Technically, we model users and items (that are captured by a user-item graph), as well as entities and relations (that are captured in a KG) in hyperbolic space, and design a hyperbolic aggregation scheme to gather relational contexts over KG. Meanwhile, we introduce a novel angle constraint to preserve characteristics of items in the embedding space. Furthermore, we propose a dual item embeddings design to represent and propagate collaborative signals and knowledge associations separately, and leverage the gated aggregation to distill discriminative information for better capturing user behavior patterns. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets show that, HAKG achieves significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods like CKAN, Hyper-Know, and KGIN. Further analyses on the learned hyperbolic embeddings confirm that HAKG offers meaningful insights into the hierarchies of data.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2022

Temporal Feature Alignment and Mutual Information Maximization for Video-Based Human Pose Estimation

Multi-frame human pose estimation has long been a compelling and fundamental problem in computer vision. This task is challenging due to fast motion and pose occlusion that frequently occur in videos. State-of-the-art methods strive to incorporate additional visual evidences from neighboring frames (supporting frames) to facilitate the pose estimation of the current frame (key frame). One aspect that has been obviated so far, is the fact that current methods directly aggregate unaligned contexts across frames. The spatial-misalignment between pose features of the current frame and neighboring frames might lead to unsatisfactory results. More importantly, existing approaches build upon the straightforward pose estimation loss, which unfortunately cannot constrain the network to fully leverage useful information from neighboring frames. To tackle these problems, we present a novel hierarchical alignment framework, which leverages coarse-to-fine deformations to progressively update a neighboring frame to align with the current frame at the feature level. We further propose to explicitly supervise the knowledge extraction from neighboring frames, guaranteeing that useful complementary cues are extracted. To achieve this goal, we theoretically analyzed the mutual information between the frames and arrived at a loss that maximizes the task-relevant mutual information. These allow us to rank No.1 in the Multi-frame Person Pose Estimation Challenge on benchmark dataset PoseTrack2017, and obtain state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks Sub-JHMDB and Pose-Track2018. Our code is released at https://github. com/Pose-Group/FAMI-Pose, hoping that it will be useful to the community.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Deep Spatially and Temporally Aware Similarity Computation for Road Network Constrained Trajectories

Trajectory similarity computation has drawn massive attention, as it is core functionality in a wide range of applications such as ride-sharing, traffic analysis, and social recommendation. Motivated by the recent success of deep learning technologies, researchers start devoting efforts to learning-based similarity analyses to overcome the limitations (i.e., high cost and poor adaptability) of traditional methods. Specifically, deep trajectory similarity computation aims to learn a distance function that can evaluate how similar two trajectories are via neural networks. However, existing learning-based methods focus on spatial similarity but ignore the time dimension of trajectories, which is suboptimal for time-aware applications. Besides, they tend to disregard the embedding of trajectories into road networks, restricting their applicability in real scenarios. In this paper, we propose an effective learning-based framework, called ST2Vec, to perform efficient spatially and temporally aware trajectory similarity computation in road networks. Finally, extensive experimental evaluation using three real trajectory data sets shows that ST2Vec outperforms all the state-of-the-art approaches substantially.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

LargeEA: Aligning Entities for Large-scale Knowledge Graphs

Entity alignment (EA) aims to find equivalent entities in different knowledge graphs (KGs). Current EA approaches suffer from scalability issues, limiting their usage in real-world EA scenarios. To tackle this challenge, we propose LargeEA to align entities between large-scale KGs. LargeEA consists of two channels, i.e., structure channel and name channel. For the structure channel, we present METIS-CPS, a memory-saving mini-batch generation strategy, to partition large KGs into smaller mini-batches. LargeEA, designed as a general tool, can adopt any existing EA approach to learn entities' structural features within each mini-batch independently. For the name channel, we first introduce NFF, a name feature fusion method, to capture rich name features of entities without involving any complex training process. Then, we exploit a name-based data augmentation to generate seed alignment without any human intervention. Such design fits common real-world scenarios much better, as seed alignment is not always available. Finally, LargeEA derives the EA results by fusing the structural features and name features of entities. Since no widely-acknowledged benchmark is available for large-scale EA evaluation, we also develop a large-scale EA benchmark called DBP1M extracted from real-world KGs. Extensive experiments confirm the superiority of LargeEA against state-of-the-art competitors.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2021

FastSGD: A Fast Compressed SGD Framework for Distributed Machine Learning

With the rapid increase of big data, distributed Machine Learning (ML) has been widely applied in training large-scale models. Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is arguably the workhorse algorithm of ML. Distributed ML models trained by SGD involve large amounts of gradient communication, which limits the scalability of distributed ML. Thus, it is important to compress the gradients for reducing communication. In this paper, we propose FastSGD, a Fast compressed SGD framework for distributed ML. To achieve a high compression ratio at a low cost, FastSGD represents the gradients as key-value pairs, and compresses both the gradient keys and values in linear time complexity. For the gradient value compression, FastSGD first uses a reciprocal mapper to transform original values into reciprocal values, and then, it utilizes a logarithm quantization to further reduce reciprocal values to small integers. Finally, FastSGD filters reduced gradient integers by a given threshold. For the gradient key compression, FastSGD provides an adaptive fine-grained delta encoding method to store gradient keys with fewer bits. Extensive experiments on practical ML models and datasets demonstrate that FastSGD achieves the compression ratio up to 4 orders of magnitude, and accelerates the convergence time up to 8x, compared with state-of-the-art methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

CollaborER: A Self-supervised Entity Resolution Framework Using Multi-features Collaboration

Entity Resolution (ER) aims to identify whether two tuples refer to the same real-world entity and is well-known to be labor-intensive. It is a prerequisite to anomaly detection, as comparing the attribute values of two matched tuples from two different datasets provides one effective way to detect anomalies. Existing ER approaches, due to insufficient feature discovery or error-prone inherent characteristics, are not able to achieve stable performance. In this paper, we present CollaborER, a self-supervised entity resolution framework via multi-features collaboration. It is capable of (i) obtaining reliable ER results with zero human annotations and (ii) discovering adequate tuples' features in a fault-tolerant manner. CollaborER consists of two phases, i.e., automatic label generation (ALG) and collaborative ER training (CERT). In the first phase, ALG is proposed to generate a set of positive tuple pairs and a set of negative tuple pairs. ALG guarantees the high quality of the generated tuples and hence ensures the training quality of the subsequent CERT. In the second phase, CERT is introduced to learn the matching signals by discovering graph features and sentence features of tuples collaboratively. Extensive experimental results over eight real-world ER benchmarks show that CollaborER outperforms all the existing unsupervised ER approaches and is comparable or even superior to the state-of-the-art supervised ER methods.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2020

CrowdTSC: Crowd-based Neural Networks for Text Sentiment Classification

Sentiment classification is a fundamental task in content analysis. Although deep learning has demonstrated promising performance in text classification compared with shallow models, it is still not able to train a satisfying classifier for text sentiment. Human beings are more sophisticated than machine learning models in terms of understanding and capturing the emotional polarities of texts. In this paper, we leverage the power of human intelligence into text sentiment classification. We propose Crowd-based neural networks for Text Sentiment Classification (CrowdTSC for short). We design and post the questions on a crowdsourcing platform to collect the keywords in texts. Sampling and clustering are utilized to reduce the cost of crowdsourcing. Also, we present an attention-based neural network and a hybrid neural network, which incorporate the collected keywords as human being's guidance into deep neural networks. Extensive experiments on public datasets confirm that CrowdTSC outperforms state-of-the-art models, justifying the effectiveness of crowd-based keyword guidance.

cs.HC↗