Online Distillation-enhanced Multi-modal Transformer for Sequential Recommendation

Multi-modal recommendation systems, which integrate diverse types of information, have gained widespread attention in recent years. However, compared to traditional collaborative filtering-based multi-modal recommendation systems, research on multi-modal sequential recommendation is still in its nascent stages. Unlike traditional sequential recommendation models that solely rely on item identifier (ID) information and focus on network structure design, multi-modal recommendation models need to emphasize item representation learning and the fusion of heterogeneous data sources. This paper investigates the impact of item representation learning on downstream recommendation tasks and examines the disparities in information fusion at different stages. Empirical experiments are conducted to demonstrate the need to design a framework suitable for collaborative learning and fusion of diverse information. Based on this, we propose a new model-agnostic framework for multi-modal sequential recommendation tasks, called Online Distillation-enhanced Multi-modal Transformer (ODMT), to enhance feature interaction and mutual learning among multi-source input (ID, text, and image), while avoiding conflicts among different features during training, thereby improving recommendation accuracy. To be specific, we first introduce an ID-aware Multi-modal Transformer module in the item representation learning stage to facilitate information interaction among different features. Secondly, we employ an online distillation training strategy in the prediction optimization stage to make multi-source data learn from each other and improve prediction robustness. Experimental results on a video content recommendation dataset and three e-commerce recommendation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed two modules, which is approximately 10% improvement in performance compared to baseline models.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

Graph Representation Learning-Based Recommender Systems

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.Personalized recommendation has been applied to many online services such as E-commerce and adverting. It facilitates users to discover a small set of relevant items, which meet their personalized interests, from many choices. Nowadays, various auxiliary information on users and items become increasingly available in online platforms, such as user demographics, social relations, and item knowledge. More recent evidences suggests that incorporating such auxiliary data with collaborative filtering can better capture the underlying and complex user-item relationships, and further achieve higher recommendation quality. In this thesis, we focus on auxiliary data with graph structure, such as social networks and knowledge graphs (KG). For example, we can improve recommendation performance by mining social relationships between users, and also by using knowledge graphs to enhance the semantics of recommended items. Network representation learning aims to represent each vertex in a network (graph) as a low-dimensional vector while still preserving its structural information. Due to the availability of massive graph data in recommender systems, it is a promising approach to combine network representation learning with recommendation. Applying the learned graph features to recommender systems will effectively enhance the learning ability of the recommender systems and improve the accuracy and user satisfaction of the recommender systems. For network representation learning and its application in recommendation systems, the major contributions of this thesis are as follows: (1) Attention-based Adversarial Autoencoder for Multi-scale Network Embedding. Existing Network representation methods usually adopt a one-size-fits-all approach when concerning multi-scale structure information, such as first- and second-order proximity of nodes, ignoring the fact that different scales play different roles in embedding learning. We propose an Attention-based Adversarial Autoencoder Network Embedding (AAANE) framework, which promotes the collaboration of different scales and lets them vote for robust representations. (2) Multi-modal Multi-view Bayesian Semantic Embedding for Community Question Answering: Semantic embedding has demonstrated its value in latent representation learning of data, and can be effectively adopted for many applications. However, it is difficult to propose a joint learning framework for semantic embedding in Community Question Answer (CQA), because CQA data have multi-view and sparse properties. In this thesis, we propose a generic Multi-modal Multi-view Semantic Embedding (MMSE) framework via a Bayesian model for question answering. (3) Context-Dependent Propagating-based Video Recommendation in Multi-modal Heterogeneous Information Networks. Conventional approaches to video recommendation primarily focus on exploiting content features or simple user-video interactions to model the users’ preferences. However these methods fail to model the complex video context interdependency, which is obscure/hidden in heterogeneous auxiliary data. In this paper, we propose a Context-Dependent Propagating Recommendation network (CDPRec) to obtain accurate video embedding and capture global context cues among videos in HINs. The CDPRec can iteratively propagate the contexts of a video along links in a graph-structured HIN and explore multiple types of dependencies among the surrounding video nodes. (4) Knowledge Graph Enhanced Neural Collaborative Filtering. Existing neural collaborative filtering (NCF) recommendation methods suffer from severe sparsity problem. Knowledge Graph (KG), which commonly consists of fruitful connected facts about items, presents an unprecedented opportunity to alleviate the sparsity problem. However, NCF only methods can hardly model the high-order connectivity in KG, and ignores complex pairwise correlations between user/item embedding dimensions. To address these issues, we propose a novel Knowledge graph enhanced Neural Collaborative Recommendation (K-NCR) framework, which effectively combines user-item interaction information and auxiliary knowledge information for recommendation

Holistic recommender systems for software engineering

The knowledge possessed by developers is often not sufficient to overcome a programming problem. Short of talking to teammates, when available, developers often gather additional knowledge from development artifacts (e.g., project documentation), as well as online resources. The web has become an essential component in the modern developer’s daily life, providing a plethora of information from sources like forums, tutorials, Q&A websites, API documentation, and even video tutorials. Recommender Systems for Software Engineering (RSSE) provide developers with assistance to navigate the information space, automatically suggest useful items, and reduce the time required to locate the needed information. Current RSSEs consider development artifacts as containers of homogeneous information in form of pure text. However, text is a means to represent heterogeneous information provided by, for example, natural language, source code, interchange formats (e.g., XML, JSON), and stack traces. Interpreting the information from a pure textual point of view misses the intrinsic heterogeneity of the artifacts, thus leading to a reductionist approach. We propose the concept of Holistic Recommender Systems for Software Engineering (H-RSSE), i.e., RSSEs that go beyond the textual interpretation of the information contained in development artifacts. Our thesis is that modeling and aggregating information in a holistic fashion enables novel and advanced analyses of development artifacts. To validate our thesis we developed a framework to extract, model and analyze information contained in development artifacts in a reusable meta- information model. We show how RSSEs benefit from a meta-information model, since it enables customized and novel analyses built on top of our framework. The information can be thus reinterpreted from an holistic point of view, preserving its multi-dimensionality, and opening the path towards the concept of holistic recommender systems for software engineering

Post Event Investigation of Multi-stream Video Data Utilizing Hadoop Cluster

Rapid advancement in technology and in-expensive camera has raised the necessity of monitoring systems for surveillance applications. As a result data acquired from numerous cameras deployed for surveillance is tremendous. When an event is triggered then, manually investigating such a massive data is a complex task. Thus it is essential to explore an approach that, can store massive multi-stream video data as well as, process them to find useful information. To address the challenge of storing and processing multi-stream video data, we have used Hadoop, which has grown into a leading computing model for data intensive applications. In this paper we propose a novel technique for performing post event investigation on stored surveillance video data. Our algorithm stores video data in HDFS in such a way that it efficiently identifies the location of data from HDFS based on the time of occurrence of event and perform further processing. To prove efficiency of our proposed work, we have performed event detection in the video based on the time period provided by the user. In order to estimate the performance of our approach, we evaluated the storage and processing of video data by varying (i) pixel resolution of video frame (ii) size of video data (iii) number of reducers (workers) executing the task (iv) the number of nodes in the cluster. The proposed framework efficiently achieve speed up of 5.9 for large files of 1024X1024 pixel resolution video frames thus makes it appropriate for the feasible practical deployment in any applications

Control and Analysis for Sequential Information based on Machine Learning

Sequential information is crucial for real-world applications that are related to time, which is same with time-series being described by sequence data followed by temporal order and regular intervals. In this thesis, we consider four major tasks of sequential information that include sequential trend prediction, control strategy optimisation, visual-temporal interpolation and visual-semantic sequential alignment. We develop machine learning theories and provide state-of-the-art models for various real-world applications that involve sequential processes, including the industrial batch process, sequential video inpainting, and sequential visual-semantic image captioning. The ultimate goal is about designing a hybrid framework that can unify diverse sequential information analysis and control systems For industrial process, control algorithms rely on simulations to find the optimal control strategy. However, few machine learning techniques can control the process using raw data, although some works use ML to predict trends. Most control methods rely on amounts of previous experiences, and cannot execute future information to optimize the control strategy. To improve the effectiveness of the industrial process, we propose improved reinforcement learning approaches that can modify the control strategy. We also propose a hybrid reinforcement virtual learning approach to optimise the long-term control strategy. This approach creates a virtual space that interacts with reinforcement learning to predict a virtual strategy without conducting any real experiments, thereby improving and optimising control efficiency. For sequential visual information analysis, we propose a dual-fusion transformer model to tackle the sequential visual-temporal encoding in video inpainting tasks. Our framework includes a flow-guided transformer with dual attention fusion, and we observe that the sequential information is effectively processed, resulting in promising inpainting videos. Finally, we propose a cycle-based captioning model for the analysis of sequential visual-semantic information. This model augments data from two views to optimise caption generation from an image, overcoming new few-shot and zero-shot settings. The proposed model can generate more accurate and informative captions by leveraging sequential visual-semantic information. Overall, the thesis contributes to analysing and manipulating sequential information in multi-modal real-world applications. Our flexible framework design provides a unified theoretical foundation to deploy sequential information systems in distinctive application domains. Considering the diversity of challenges addressed in this thesis, we believe our technique paves the pathway towards versatile AI in the new era

Discovery of Shared Semantic Spaces for Multiscene Video Query and Summarization.

The growing rate of public space CCTV installations has generated a need for automated methods for exploiting video surveillance data including scene understanding, query, behaviour annotation and summarization. For this reason, extensive research has been performed on surveillance scene understanding and analysis. However, most studies have considered single scenes, or groups of adjacent scenes. The semantic similarity between different but related scenes (e.g., many different traffic scenes of similar layout) is not generally exploited to improve any automated surveillance tasks and reduce manual effort. Exploiting commonality, and sharing any supervised annotations, between different scenes is however challenging due to: Some scenes are totally un-related -- and thus any information sharing between them would be detrimental; while others may only share a subset of common activities -- and thus information sharing is only useful if it is selective. Moreover, semantically similar activities which should be modelled together and shared across scenes may have quite different pixel-level appearance in each scene. To address these issues we develop a new framework for distributed multiple-scene global understanding that clusters surveillance scenes by their ability to explain each other's behaviours; and further discovers which subset of activities are shared versus scene-specific within each cluster. We show how to use this structured representation of multiple scenes to improve common surveillance tasks including scene activity understanding, cross-scene query-by-example, behaviour classification with reduced supervised labelling requirements, and video summarization. In each case we demonstrate how our multi-scene model improves on a collection of standard single scene models and a flat model of all scenes.Comment: Multi-Scene Traffic Behaviour Analysis ---- Accepted at IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technolog

Multi modal multi-semantic image retrieval

PhDThe rapid growth in the volume of visual information, e.g. image, and video can overwhelm users’ ability to find and access the specific visual information of interest to them. In recent years, ontology knowledge-based (KB) image information retrieval techniques have been adopted into in order to attempt to extract knowledge from these images, enhancing the retrieval performance. A KB framework is presented to promote semi-automatic annotation and semantic image retrieval using multimodal cues (visual features and text captions). In addition, a hierarchical structure for the KB allows metadata to be shared that supports multi-semantics (polysemy) for concepts. The framework builds up an effective knowledge base pertaining to a domain specific image collection, e.g. sports, and is able to disambiguate and assign high level semantics to ‘unannotated’ images. Local feature analysis of visual content, namely using Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) descriptors, have been deployed in the ‘Bag of Visual Words’ model (BVW) as an effective method to represent visual content information and to enhance its classification and retrieval. Local features are more useful than global features, e.g. colour, shape or texture, as they are invariant to image scale, orientation and camera angle. An innovative approach is proposed for the representation, annotation and retrieval of visual content using a hybrid technique based upon the use of an unstructured visual word and upon a (structured) hierarchical ontology KB model. The structural model facilitates the disambiguation of unstructured visual words and a more effective classification of visual content, compared to a vector space model, through exploiting local conceptual structures and their relationships. The key contributions of this framework in using local features for image representation include: first, a method to generate visual words using the semantic local adaptive clustering (SLAC) algorithm which takes term weight and spatial locations of keypoints into account. Consequently, the semantic information is preserved. Second a technique is used to detect the domain specific ‘non-informative visual words’ which are ineffective at representing the content of visual data and degrade its categorisation ability. Third, a method to combine an ontology model with xi a visual word model to resolve synonym (visual heterogeneity) and polysemy problems, is proposed. The experimental results show that this approach can discover semantically meaningful visual content descriptions and recognise specific events, e.g., sports events, depicted in images efficiently. Since discovering the semantics of an image is an extremely challenging problem, one promising approach to enhance visual content interpretation is to use any associated textual information that accompanies an image, as a cue to predict the meaning of an image, by transforming this textual information into a structured annotation for an image e.g. using XML, RDF, OWL or MPEG-7. Although, text and image are distinct types of information representation and modality, there are some strong, invariant, implicit, connections between images and any accompanying text information. Semantic analysis of image captions can be used by image retrieval systems to retrieve selected images more precisely. To do this, a Natural Language Processing (NLP) is exploited firstly in order to extract concepts from image captions. Next, an ontology-based knowledge model is deployed in order to resolve natural language ambiguities. To deal with the accompanying text information, two methods to extract knowledge from textual information have been proposed. First, metadata can be extracted automatically from text captions and restructured with respect to a semantic model. Second, the use of LSI in relation to a domain-specific ontology-based knowledge model enables the combined framework to tolerate ambiguities and variations (incompleteness) of metadata. The use of the ontology-based knowledge model allows the system to find indirectly relevant concepts in image captions and thus leverage these to represent the semantics of images at a higher level. Experimental results show that the proposed framework significantly enhances image retrieval and leads to narrowing of the semantic gap between lower level machinederived and higher level human-understandable conceptualisation

Multi-Stage Based Feature Fusion of Multi-Modal Data for Human Activity Recognition

To properly assist humans in their needs, human activity recognition (HAR) systems need the ability to fuse information from multiple modalities. Our hypothesis is that multimodal sensors, visual and non-visual tend to provide complementary information, addressing the limitations of other modalities. In this work, we propose a multi-modal framework that learns to effectively combine features from RGB Video and IMU sensors, and show its robustness for MMAct and UTD-MHAD datasets. Our model is trained in two-stage, where in the first stage, each input encoder learns to effectively extract features, and in the second stage, learns to combine these individual features. We show significant improvements of 22% and 11% compared to video only and IMU only setup on UTD-MHAD dataset, and 20% and 12% on MMAct datasets. Through extensive experimentation, we show the robustness of our model on zero shot setting, and limited annotated data setting. We further compare with state-of-the-art methods that use more input modalities and show that our method outperforms significantly on the more difficult MMact dataset, and performs comparably in UTD-MHAD dataset

Temporal Pyramid Network for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction with Multi-Supervision

Predicting human motion behavior in a crowd is important for many applications, ranging from the natural navigation of autonomous vehicles to intelligent security systems of video surveillance. All the previous works model and predict the trajectory with a single resolution, which is rather inefficient and difficult to simultaneously exploit the long-range information (e.g., the destination of the trajectory), and the short-range information (e.g., the walking direction and speed at a certain time) of the motion behavior. In this paper, we propose a temporal pyramid network for pedestrian trajectory prediction through a squeeze modulation and a dilation modulation. Our hierarchical framework builds a feature pyramid with increasingly richer temporal information from top to bottom, which can better capture the motion behavior at various tempos. Furthermore, we propose a coarse-to-fine fusion strategy with multi-supervision. By progressively merging the top coarse features of global context to the bottom fine features of rich local context, our method can fully exploit both the long-range and short-range information of the trajectory. Experimental results on several benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure