A database with enterprise application for mining astronomical data obtained by MOA : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of the Master of Information Science in Computer Science, Massey University at Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

The MOA (Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics) Project is one of a new generation of modern astronomy endeavours that generates huge volumes of data. These have enormous scientific data mining potential. However, it is common for astronomers to deal with millions and even billions of records. The challenge of how to manage these large data sets is an important case for researchers. A good database management system is vital for the research. With the modern observation equipments used, MOA suffers from the growing volume of the data and a database management solution is needed. This study analyzed the modern technology for database and enterprise application. After analysing the data mining requirements of MOA, a prototype data management system based on MVC pattern was developed. Furthermore, the application supports sharing MOA findings and scientific data on the Internet. It was tested on a 7GB subset of achieved MOA data set. After testing, it was found that the application could query data in an efficient time and support data mining

A new characterization of fuzzy ideals of semigroups and its applications

In this paper, we develop a new technique for constructing fuzzy ideals of a semigroup. By using generalized Green\u27s relations, fuzzy star ideals are constructed. It is shown that the new fuzzy ideal of a semigroup can be used to investigate the relationship between fuzzy sets and abundance and regularity for an arbitrary semigroup. Appropriate examples of such fuzzy ideals are given in order to illustrate the technique. Finally, we explain when a semigroup satisfies conditions of regularity

List-aware Reranking-Truncation Joint Model for Search and Retrieval-augmented Generation

The results of information retrieval (IR) are usually presented in the form of a ranked list of candidate documents, such as web search for humans and retrieval-augmented generation for large language models (LLMs). List-aware retrieval aims to capture the list-level contextual features to return a better list, mainly including reranking and truncation. Reranking finely re-scores the documents in the list. Truncation dynamically determines the cut-off point of the ranked list to achieve the trade-off between overall relevance and avoiding misinformation from irrelevant documents. Previous studies treat them as two separate tasks and model them separately. However, the separation is not optimal. First, it is hard to share the contextual information of the ranking list between the two tasks. Second, the separate pipeline usually meets the error accumulation problem, where the small error from the reranking stage can largely affect the truncation stage. To solve these problems, we propose a Reranking-Truncation joint model (GenRT) that can perform the two tasks concurrently. GenRT integrates reranking and truncation via generative paradigm based on encoder-decoder architecture. We also design the novel loss functions for joint optimization to make the model learn both tasks. Sharing parameters by the joint model is conducive to making full use of the common modeling information of the two tasks. Besides, the two tasks are performed concurrently and co-optimized to solve the error accumulation problem between separate stages. Experiments on public learning-to-rank benchmarks and open-domain Q\&A tasks show that our method achieves SOTA performance on both reranking and truncation tasks for web search and retrieval-augmented LLMs.Comment: Accepted by WWW 202

NIR-Prompt: A Multi-task Generalized Neural Information Retrieval Training Framework

Information retrieval aims to find information that meets users' needs from the corpus. Different needs correspond to different IR tasks such as document retrieval, open-domain question answering, retrieval-based dialogue, etc., while they share the same schema to estimate the relationship between texts. It indicates that a good IR model can generalize to different tasks and domains. However, previous studies indicate that state-of-the-art neural information retrieval (NIR) models, e.g, pre-trained language models (PLMs) are hard to generalize. Mainly because the end-to-end fine-tuning paradigm makes the model overemphasize task-specific signals and domain biases but loses the ability to capture generalized essential signals. To address this problem, we propose a novel NIR training framework named NIR-Prompt for retrieval and reranking stages based on the idea of decoupling signal capturing and combination. NIR-Prompt exploits Essential Matching Module (EMM) to capture the essential matching signals and gets the description of tasks by Matching Description Module (MDM). The description is used as task-adaptation information to combine the essential matching signals to adapt to different tasks. Experiments under in-domain multi-task, out-of-domain multi-task, and new task adaptation settings show that NIR-Prompt can improve the generalization of PLMs in NIR for both retrieval and reranking stages compared with baselines.Comment: This article is the extension of arXiv:2204.02725 and accepted by TOI

Resilient neural network training for accelerators with computing errors

—With the advancements of neural networks, customized accelerators are increasingly adopted in massive AI applications. To gain higher energy efficiency or performance, many hardware design optimizations such as near-threshold logic or overclocking can be utilized. In these cases, computing errors may happen and the computing errors are difficult to be captured by conventional training on general purposed processors (GPPs). Applying the offline trained neural network models to the accelerators with errors directly may lead to considerable prediction accuracy loss. To address this problem, we explore the resilience of neural network models and relax the accelerator design constraints to enable aggressive design options. First of all, we propose to train the neural network models using the accelerators’ forward computing results such that the models can learn both the data and the computing errors. In addition, we observe that some of the neural network layers are more sensitive to the computing errors. With this observation, we schedule the most sensitive layer to the attached GPP to reduce the negative influence of the computing errors. According to the experiments, the neural network models obtained from the proposed training outperform the original models significantly when the CNN accelerators are affected by computing errors

Predicting the Silent Majority on Graphs: Knowledge Transferable Graph Neural Network

Graphs consisting of vocal nodes ("the vocal minority") and silent nodes ("the silent majority"), namely VS-Graph, are ubiquitous in the real world. The vocal nodes tend to have abundant features and labels. In contrast, silent nodes only have incomplete features and rare labels, e.g., the description and political tendency of politicians (vocal) are abundant while not for ordinary people (silent) on the twitter's social network. Predicting the silent majority remains a crucial yet challenging problem. However, most existing message-passing based GNNs assume that all nodes belong to the same domain, without considering the missing features and distribution-shift between domains, leading to poor ability to deal with VS-Graph. To combat the above challenges, we propose Knowledge Transferable Graph Neural Network (KT-GNN), which models distribution shifts during message passing and representation learning by transferring knowledge from vocal nodes to silent nodes. Specifically, we design the domain-adapted "feature completion and message passing mechanism" for node representation learning while preserving domain difference. And a knowledge transferable classifier based on KL-divergence is followed. Comprehensive experiments on real-world scenarios (i.e., company financial risk assessment and political elections) demonstrate the superior performance of our method. Our source code has been open sourced.Comment: Paper was accepted by WWW202

A Robust Method for Speech Emotion Recognition Based on Infinite Student’s t

Speech emotion classification method, proposed in this paper, is based on Student’s t-mixture model with infinite component number (iSMM) and can directly conduct effective recognition for various kinds of speech emotion samples. Compared with the traditional GMM (Gaussian mixture model), speech emotion model based on Student’s t-mixture can effectively handle speech sample outliers that exist in the emotion feature space. Moreover, t-mixture model could keep robust to atypical emotion test data. In allusion to the high data complexity caused by high-dimensional space and the problem of insufficient training samples, a global latent space is joined to emotion model. Such an approach makes the number of components divided infinite and forms an iSMM emotion model, which can automatically determine the best number of components with lower complexity to complete various kinds of emotion characteristics data classification. Conducted over one spontaneous (FAU Aibo Emotion Corpus) and two acting (DES and EMO-DB) universal speech emotion databases which have high-dimensional feature samples and diversiform data distributions, the iSMM maintains better recognition performance than the comparisons. Thus, the effectiveness and generalization to the high-dimensional data and the outliers are verified. Hereby, the iSMM emotion model is verified as a robust method with the validity and generalization to outliers and high-dimensional emotion characters