Afraid of Niche, Tired of Mass: Atypical Idea Combination on Crowdfunding Platform

A new idea usually follows a stream of similar ideas yet simultaneously combines atypical elements from ideas outside this stream. A successful business idea usually balances well between familiarity and atypicality. To investigate the relationship between atypicality innovation and crowdfunding project performance, we collected data from one of the largest crowdfunding platforms in China. We build a similarity network of crowdfunding projects to measure the degree of atypicality innovation for these projects. Using a double machine learning model, we find that the atypical combination of mainstream and niche ideas has a significant positive effect on the individual project\u27s funding, i.e., five times more successful than other projects. We also find the potential reasons that cause the poor performance of niche and mainstream projects. Donors are more conservative due to the high risk of niche projects and driven away by the monotonous repetition of mainstream projects

Spatial-temporal Transformer-guided Diffusion based Data Augmentation for Efficient Skeleton-based Action Recognition

Recently, skeleton-based human action has become a hot research topic because the compact representation of human skeletons brings new blood to this research domain. As a result, researchers began to notice the importance of using RGB or other sensors to analyze human action by extracting skeleton information. Leveraging the rapid development of deep learning (DL), a significant number of skeleton-based human action approaches have been presented with fine-designed DL structures recently. However, a well-trained DL model always demands high-quality and sufficient data, which is hard to obtain without costing high expenses and human labor. In this paper, we introduce a novel data augmentation method for skeleton-based action recognition tasks, which can effectively generate high-quality and diverse sequential actions. In order to obtain natural and realistic action sequences, we propose denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) that can generate a series of synthetic action sequences, and their generation process is precisely guided by a spatial-temporal transformer (ST-Trans). Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) motion generation approaches on different naturality and diversity metrics. It proves that its high-quality synthetic data can also be effectively deployed to existing action recognition models with significant performance improvement

Transferring Procedural Knowledge across Commonsense Tasks

Stories about everyday situations are an essential part of human communication, motivating the need to develop AI agents that can reliably understand these stories. Despite the long list of supervised methods for story completion and procedural understanding, current AI has no mechanisms to automatically track and explain procedures in unseen stories. To bridge this gap, we study the ability of AI models to transfer procedural knowledge to novel narrative tasks in a transparent manner. We design LEAP: a comprehensive framework that integrates state-of-the-art modeling architectures, training regimes, and augmentation strategies based on both natural and synthetic stories. To address the lack of densely annotated training data, we devise a robust automatic labeler based on few-shot prompting to enhance the augmented data. Our experiments with in- and out-of-domain tasks reveal insights into the interplay of different architectures, training regimes, and augmentation strategies. LEAP's labeler has a clear positive impact on out-of-domain datasets, while the resulting dense annotation provides native explainability

Informative Policy Representations in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Joint-Action Distributions

In multi-agent reinforcement learning, the inherent non-stationarity of the environment caused by other agents' actions posed significant difficulties for an agent to learn a good policy independently. One way to deal with non-stationarity is agent modeling, by which the agent takes into consideration the influence of other agents' policies. Most existing work relies on predicting other agents' actions or goals, or discriminating between their policies. However, such modeling fails to capture the similarities and differences between policies simultaneously and thus cannot provide useful information when generalizing to unseen policies. To address this, we propose a general method to learn representations of other agents' policies via the joint-action distributions sampled in interactions. The similarities and differences between policies are naturally captured by the policy distance inferred from the joint-action distributions and deliberately reflected in the learned representations. Agents conditioned on the policy representations can well generalize to unseen agents. We empirically demonstrate that our method outperforms existing work in multi-agent tasks when facing unseen agents