Towards Hard-Positive Query Mining for DETR-based Human-Object Interaction Detection

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection is a core task for high-level image understanding. Recently, Detection Transformer (DETR)-based HOI detectors have become popular due to their superior performance and efficient structure. However, these approaches typically adopt fixed HOI queries for all testing images, which is vulnerable to the location change of objects in one specific image. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose to enhance DETR's robustness by mining hard-positive queries, which are forced to make correct predictions using partial visual cues. First, we explicitly compose hard-positive queries according to the ground-truth (GT) position of labeled human-object pairs for each training image. Specifically, we shift the GT bounding boxes of each labeled human-object pair so that the shifted boxes cover only a certain portion of the GT ones. We encode the coordinates of the shifted boxes for each labeled human-object pair into an HOI query. Second, we implicitly construct another set of hard-positive queries by masking the top scores in cross-attention maps of the decoder layers. The masked attention maps then only cover partial important cues for HOI predictions. Finally, an alternate strategy is proposed that efficiently combines both types of hard queries. In each iteration, both DETR's learnable queries and one selected type of hard-positive queries are adopted for loss computation. Experimental results show that our proposed approach can be widely applied to existing DETR-based HOI detectors. Moreover, we consistently achieve state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarks: HICO-DET, V-COCO, and HOI-A. Code is available at https://github.com/MuchHair/HQM.Comment: Accepted by ECCV202

A convexity approach to dynamic output feedback robust MPC for LPV systems with bounded disturbances

International audienceA convexity approach to dynamic output feedback robust model predictive control (OFRMPC) is proposed for linear parameter varying (LPV) systems with bounded disturbances. At each sampling time, the model parameters and disturbances are assumed to be unknown but bounded within pre-specified convex sets. Robust stability conditions on the augmented closed-loop system are derived using the techniques of robust positively invariant (RPI) set and the S-procedure. A convexity method reformulates the non-convex bilinear matrix inequalities (BMIs) problem as a convex optimization one such that the on-line computational burden is significantly reduced. The on-line optimized dynamic output feedback controller parameters steer the augmented states to converge within RPI sets and recursive feasibility of the optimization problem is guaranteed. Furthermore, bounds of the estimation error set are refreshed by updating the shape matrix of the future ellipsoidal estimation error set. The dynamic OFRMPC approach guarantees that the disturbance-free augmented closed-loop system (without consideration of disturbances) converges to the origin. In addition, when the system is subject to bounded disturbances, the augmented closed-loop system converges to a neighborhood of the origin. Two simulation examples are given to verify the effectiveness of the approach

Long Short-Term Planning for Conversational Recommendation Systems

In Conversational Recommendation Systems (CRS), the central question is how the conversational agent can naturally ask for user preferences and provide suitable recommendations. Existing works mainly follow the hierarchical architecture, where a higher policy decides whether to invoke the conversation module (to ask questions) or the recommendation module (to make recommendations). This architecture prevents these two components from fully interacting with each other. In contrast, this paper proposes a novel architecture, the long short-term feedback architecture, to connect these two essential components in CRS. Specifically, the recommendation predicts the long-term recommendation target based on the conversational context and the user history. Driven by the targeted recommendation, the conversational model predicts the next topic or attribute to verify if the user preference matches the target. The balance feedback loop continues until the short-term planner output matches the long-term planner output, that is when the system should make the recommendation.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures. Accepted by ICONIP 202

Graph Transformer for Recommendation

This paper presents a novel approach to representation learning in recommender systems by integrating generative self-supervised learning with graph transformer architecture. We highlight the importance of high-quality data augmentation with relevant self-supervised pretext tasks for improving performance. Towards this end, we propose a new approach that automates the self-supervision augmentation process through a rationale-aware generative SSL that distills informative user-item interaction patterns. The proposed recommender with Graph TransFormer (GFormer) that offers parameterized collaborative rationale discovery for selective augmentation while preserving global-aware user-item relationships. In GFormer, we allow the rationale-aware SSL to inspire graph collaborative filtering with task-adaptive invariant rationalization in graph transformer. The experimental results reveal that our GFormer has the capability to consistently improve the performance over baselines on different datasets. Several in-depth experiments further investigate the invariant rationale-aware augmentation from various aspects. The source code for this work is publicly available at: https://github.com/HKUDS/GFormer.Comment: Accepted by SIGIR'202

Constructing Media-based Enterprise Networks for Stock Market Risk Analysis

Stock comovement analysis is essential to understand the mechanism of stock markets. Previous studies focus on the comovement from the perspectives of fundamentals or preferences of investors. In this article, we propose a framework to explore the comovements of stocks in terms of their relationships in Web media. This is achieved by constructing media-based enterprise networks in terms of the co-exposure in news reports of stocks and mutual attentions among them. Our experiments based on CSI 300 listed firms show the significant comovements of stocks brought out by their behaviors in Web media. Furthermore, utilizing media based enterprise networks can help us identify the most influential firms which can stir up the stock markets

Multi-Scenario Ranking with Adaptive Feature Learning

Recently, Multi-Scenario Learning (MSL) is widely used in recommendation and retrieval systems in the industry because it facilitates transfer learning from different scenarios, mitigating data sparsity and reducing maintenance cost. These efforts produce different MSL paradigms by searching more optimal network structure, such as Auxiliary Network, Expert Network, and Multi-Tower Network. It is intuitive that different scenarios could hold their specific characteristics, activating the user's intents quite differently. In other words, different kinds of auxiliary features would bear varying importance under different scenarios. With more discriminative feature representations refined in a scenario-aware manner, better ranking performance could be easily obtained without expensive search for the optimal network structure. Unfortunately, this simple idea is mainly overlooked but much desired in real-world systems.Further analysis also validates the rationality of adaptive feature learning under a multi-scenario scheme. Moreover, our A/B test results on the Alibaba search advertising platform also demonstrate that Maria is superior in production environments.Comment: 10 pages