61 accepted papers
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve impressive performance once optimized on massive datasets. Such datasets often contain sensitive or copyrighted content, raising significant data privacy concerns. Regulatory frameworks mandating the
Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a distributed machine learning paradigm due to its privacy-preserving advantages. Most FL studies assume offline labeled datasets are available at clients. In practice, however, client data often arrive without labels in a streaming manner, making label acquisi
Diffusion auction design is a new trend in mechanism design which extends the original incentive compatibility property to include buyers
Incentives for early arrival (I4EA) was recently proposed for studying online cooperative games. In an online cooperative game, players arrive in an unknown order, and the value increase after each player arrived should be distributed immediately among all the arrived players. Although there is only
Partial Multi-Label Feature Selection (PMLFS) integrates partial multi-label learning and Multi-Label Feature Selection (MLFS) within a unified optimization framework. Owing to the presence of noisy labels, it is more practical and challenging compared to traditional MLFS. However, existing methods
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) marks a transformative era in artificial intelligence~(AI). However, systematically evaluating the capability of LLMs is challenging due to the necessity of a large number of labeled test data. To tackle this problem, in the conventional AI field, AutoEv
Although Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at code generation, recent research reveals that they exhibit an insufficient grasp of core programming concepts, such as data flow and control flow. This limitation undermines their robustness when encountering variations in these concepts in practice; ho
Standard Large Language Models (LLMs) operate on a ''read-then-generate'' paradigm, incurring avoidable latency and computational redundancy. Recently, streaming LLMs have attempted to overcome these bottlenecks by allowing input and output to unfold synchronously. However, this introduces a critica…
Neural network constraint satisfaction is crucial for safety-critical applications such as power system optimization, robotic path planning, and autonomous driving. However, existing constraint satisfaction methods face efficiency-applicability trade-offs, with hard constraint methods suffering from
Few-shot action recognition (FSAR) has recently made notable progress through set matching and efficient adaptation of large-scale pre-trained models. However, two key limitations persist. First, existing set matching metrics typically rely on cosine similarity to measure inter-frame linear dependen
Inter-agent communication serves as an effective mechanism for enhancing performance in collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) systems. However, the inherent communication latency in practical systems induces both action decision delays and outdated information sharing, impeding MAR
Detecting text generated by large language models~(LLMs) is crucial but challenging. Existing detectors depend on impractical assumptions, such as white-box settings, or solely rely on text-level features, leading to imprecise detection ability. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective and p
Web agents hold great potential for automating complex computer tasks, yet their interactions involve long horizons, multi-step decisions, and actions that can be irreversible. In such settings, outcome-based supervision is sparse and delayed, often rewarding incorrect trajectories and failing to su…
Recent advances in vision-language pre-training have significantly enhanced the model capabilities on grounded object detection. However, these studies often pre-train with coarse-grained text prompts, such as plain category names and brief grounded phrases. This limitation curtails the model's capa…
One-Shot Federated Learning (OSFL), a special decentralized machine learning paradigm, has recently gained significant attention. OSFL requires only a single round of client data or model upload, which reduces communication costs and mitigates privacy threats compared to traditional FL. Despite thes…
Video Question-Answer-Distractors (QADs) show promising values for assessing the performance of systems in perceiving and comprehending multimedia content. Given the significant cost and labor demands of manual annotation, existing large-scale Video QADs benchmarks are typically generated automatica…
We study cooperative games where players join sequentially, and the value generated by those who have joined at any point must be irrevocably divided among these players. We introduce two desiderata for the value division mechanism: that the players should have incentives to join as early as possibl
Medical Dialogue Systems (MDSs) have emerged as promising tools for automated healthcare support through patient-agent interactions. Previous efforts typically relied on an idealized assumption — patients can accurately report symptoms aligned with their actual health conditions. However, in reality…
Businesses using third-party LLMs face privacy risks from exposed prompts. This paper presents Portcullis, a privacy-preserving gateway that safeguards sensitive data while supporting efficient and accurate LLM responses. Portcullis functions as a mediator, anonymizing sensitive data in prompts thro…
Despite the great potential of large language models (LLMs) in machine comprehension, it is still disturbing to fully count on them in real-world scenarios. This is probably because there is no rational explanation for whether the comprehension process of LLMs is aligned with that of experts. In thi…
The rapid progress of Large Language Models has advanced agentic systems in decision-making, coordination, and task execution. Yet, existing agentic system generation frameworks lack full autonomy, missing from-scratch agent generation, self-optimizing agent functionality, and collaboration, limitin
LLM-based autonomous agents often fail to execute complex web tasks that require dynamic interaction, largely due to the inherent uncertainty and complexity of these environments. Existing LLM-based web agents typically rely on rigid, expert-designed policies specific to certain states and actions,…
Powered knee prostheses promise to improve the mobility of transfemoral amputees by imitating the biomechanics of the missing knee joint. Unfortunately, the heavy weight and short battery life severely limit the application of powered prostheses. Here, we present a lightweight powered knee prosthesi
Multiple-choice visual question answering (MC VQA) requires an answer picked from a list of distractors, based on a question and an image. This research has attracted wide interest from the fields of visual question answering, visual question generation, and visual distractor generation. However, th…
Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection (ESD) is a minimally invasive procedure designed to remove precancerous and cancerous lesions from the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. Given the GI tract’s tortuous and narrow shape, along with the need for varied movements during dissection, this requires highly flexib…
Multiple-choice visual question answering (VQA) is to automatically choose a correct answer from a set of choices after reading an image. Existing efforts have been devoted to a separate generation of an image-related question, a correct answer, or challenge distractors. By contrast, we turn to a ho…
Recently, foundation models have exhibited remarkable advancements in multi-modal learning. These models, equipped with millions (or billions) of parameters, typically require a substantial amount of data for finetuning. However, collecting and centralizing training data from diverse sectors becomes…
Due to the high cost of training DNN models, how to protect the intellectual property of DNN models, especially when the models are deployed to users' devices, is becoming an important topic. One practical solution is to use Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and researchers have proposed various…
Recently, incorporating structure information (e.g. dependency syntactic tree) can enhance the performance of aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA). However, this structure information is obtained from off-the-shelf parsers, which is often sub-optimal and cumbersome. Thus, automatically learning ad…
Since conventional knowledge embedding models cannot take full advantage of the abundant textual information, there have been extensive research efforts in enhancing knowledge embedding using texts. However, existing enhancement approaches cannot apply to temporal knowledge graphs (tKGs), which cont…
While GNN explanation has recently received significant attention, existing works are consistently designed for static graphs. Due to the prevalence of temporal graphs, many temporal graph models have been proposed, but explaining their predictions remains to be explored. To bridge the gap, in this…
Selecting influentials in networks against strategic manipulations has attracted many researchers' attention and it also has many practical applications. Here, we aim to select one or two influentials in terms of progeny (the influential power) and prevent agents from manipulating their edges (incen…
Financial volatility prediction is vital for indicating a company's risk profile. Transcripts of companies' earnings calls are important unstructured data sources to be utilized to access companies' performance and risk profiles. However, current works ignore the role of financial metrics knowledge…
Due to domain shift, deep neural networks (DNNs) usually fail to generalize well on unknown test data in practice. Domain generalization (DG) aims to overcome this issue by capturing domain-invariant representations from source domains. Motivated by the insight that only partial parameters of DNNs a…
Recently, the dominant DETR-based approaches apply central-concept spatial prior to accelerating Transformer detector convergency. These methods gradually refine the reference points to the center of target objects and imbue object queries with the updated central reference information for spatially…
We study a single task allocation problem where each worker connects to some other workers to form a network and the task requester only connects to some of the workers. The goal is to design an allocation mechanism such that each worker is incentivized to invite her neighbours to join the allocatio…
Accurate knowledge selection is critical in knowledge-grounded dialogue systems. Towards a closer look at it, we offer a novel perspective to organize existing literature, i.e., knowledge selection coupled with, after, and before generation. We focus on the third under-explored category of study,…
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has drawn more and more attention because of its extensive applications. However, towards the sentence carried with more than one aspect, most existing works generate an aspect-specific sentence representation for each aspect term to predict sentiment polarity,…
In cardiovascular interventions, when steering catheters and especially robotic catheters, great care should be paid to prevent applying too large forces on the vessel walls as this could dislodge calcifications, induce scars or even cause perforation. To address this challenge, this paper presents
A hybrid knee prosthesis is proposed in this letter, which consists of a polycentric structure in passive mode for low-torque activities and a single-axis structure in active mode for high-torque activities. A novel mode transition mechanism controls self-holding electromagnets for switching modes b
We study a cooperative game setting where we want to gather more players through their social connections. Social connections can be modeled as a graph, and initially, only a subset of the players are in the game. We want to introduce diffusion incentives in such a cooperative game, i.e., incentiviz…
Current Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs (KGQA) task mainly focuses on performing answer reasoning upon KGs with binary facts. However, it neglects the n-ary facts, which contain more than two entities. In this work, we highlight a more challenging but under-explored task: n-ary KGQA, i.e.,…
Conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) allow us to understand the effect heterogeneity across a large population of individuals. However, typical CATE learners assume all confounding variables are measured in order for the CATE to be identifiable. This requirement can be satisfied by collecti…
Procedural Multimodal Documents (PMDs) organize textual instructions and corresponding images step by step. Comprehending PMDs and inducing their representations for the downstream reasoning tasks is designated as Procedural MultiModal Machine Comprehension (M3C). In this study, we approach Procedur…
Peer reviewing is a central process in modern research and essential for ensuring high quality and reliability of published work. At the same time, it is a time-consuming process and increasing interest in emerging fields often results in a high review workload, especially for senior researchers in…
Different to traditional on-premise VDI , the virtual desktops in DaaS (Desktop as a Service) are hosted in public cloud where virtual machines are charged based on usage. Accordingly, an adaptive power management system which can turn off spare virtual machines without sacrificing end user experien…
Knowledge graphs are essential for numerous downstream natural language processing applications, but are typically incomplete with many facts missing. This results in research efforts on multi-hop reasoning task, which can be formulated as a search process and current models typically perform short…
Developing link prediction models to automatically complete knowledge graphs has recently been the focus of significant research interest. The current methods for the link prediction task have two natural problems: 1) the relation distributions in KGs are usually unbalanced, and 2) there are many un…
Catheters are increasingly being used to tackle problems in the cardiovascular system. However, positioning precision of the catheter tip is negatively affected by hysteresis. To ensure tissue damage due to imprecise positioning is avoided, hysteresis is to be understood and compensated for. This wo
Missing data is an important problem in machine learning practice. Starting from the premise that imputation methods should preserve the causal structure of the data, we develop a regularization scheme that encourages any baseline imputation method to be causally consistent with the underlying data…
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have recently emerged as revolutionary technologies for machine learning tasks on graphs. In GNNs, the graph structure is generally incorporated with node representation via the message passing scheme, making the explanation much more challenging. Given a trained GNN mod…
Most of the medical observational studies estimate the causal treatment effects using electronic health records (EHR), where a patient's covariates and outcomes are both observed longitudinally. However, previous methods focus only on adjusting for the covariates while neglecting the temporal struct…
Regularization improves generalization of supervised models to out-of-sample data. Prior works have shown that prediction in the causal direction (effect from cause) results in lower testing error than the anti-causal direction. However, existing regularization methods are agnostic of causality. We…
Deciding how to optimally treat a patient, including how to select treatments over time among the multiple available treatments, represents one of the most important issues that need to be addressed in medicine today. A dynamic treatment regime (DTR) is a sequence of treatment rules indicating how t…
The choice of making an intervention depends on its potential benefit or harm in comparison to alternatives. Estimating the likely outcome of alternatives from observational data is a challenging problem as all outcomes are never observed, and selection bias precludes the direct comparison of differ…
Machine learning has proved its ability to produce accurate models -- but the deployment of these models outside the machine learning community has been hindered by the difficulties of interpreting these models. This paper proposes an algorithm that produces a continuous global interpretation of any…
Subgroup analysis of treatment effects plays an important role in applications from medicine to public policy to recommender systems. It allows physicians (for example) to identify groups of patients for whom a given drug or treatment is likely to be effective and groups of patients for which it is…
An essential problem in automated machine learning (AutoML) is that of model selection. A unique challenge in the sequential setting is the fact that the optimal model itself may vary over time, depending on the distribution of features and labels available up to each point in time. In this paper, w…
We study a question answering problem on a social network, where a requester is seeking an answer from the agents on the network. The goal is to design reward mechanisms to incentivize the agents to propagate the requester's query to their neighbours if they don't have the answer. Existing mechanism…
Self- and semi-supervised learning frameworks have made significant progress in training machine learning models with limited labeled data in image and language domains. These methods heavily rely on the unique structure in the domain datasets (such as spatial relationships in images or semantic rel…
In this paper, we propose a kind of image representation, named PCA filters based convolutional channel features (PCA-CCF) for pedestrian detection. The motivation is to use the convolutional network architecture with orthogonal PCA filters to enhance the state-of-the-art aggregate channel features…