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Nowadays, it becomes a common practice to capture some data of sports games with devices such as GPS sensors and cameras and then use the data to perform various analyses on sports games, including tactics discovery, similar game retrieval, performance study, etc. While this practice has been conducted to many sports such as basketball and soccer, it remains largely unexplored on the billiards sports, which is mainly due to the lack of publicly available datasets. Motivated by this, we collect a dataset of billiards sports, which includes the layouts (i.e., locations) of billiards balls after performing break shots, called break shot layouts, the traces of the balls as a result of strikes (in the form of trajectories), and detailed statistics and performance indicators. We then study and develop techniques for three tasks on the collected dataset, including (1) prediction and (2) generation on the layouts data, and (3) similar billiards layout retrieval on the layouts data, which can serve different users such as coaches, players and fans. We conduct extensive experiments on the collected dataset and the results show that our methods perform effectively and efficiently., Comment: 27 pages; This paper is accepted by TKDD'2024

This paper focuses on the integration of generative techniques into spatial-temporal data mining, considering the significant growth and diverse nature of spatial-temporal data. With the advancements in RNNs, CNNs, and other non-generative techniques, researchers have explored their application in capturing temporal and spatial dependencies within spatial-temporal data. However, the emergence of generative techniques such as LLMs, SSL, Seq2Seq and diffusion models has opened up new possibilities for enhancing spatial-temporal data mining further. The paper provides a comprehensive analysis of generative technique-based spatial-temporal methods and introduces a standardized framework specifically designed for the spatial-temporal data mining pipeline. By offering a detailed review and a novel taxonomy of spatial-temporal methodology utilizing generative techniques, the paper enables a deeper understanding of the various techniques employed in this field. Furthermore, the paper highlights promising future research directions, urging researchers to delve deeper into spatial-temporal data mining. It emphasizes the need to explore untapped opportunities and push the boundaries of knowledge to unlock new insights and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of spatial-temporal data mining. By integrating generative techniques and providing a standardized framework, the paper contributes to advancing the field and encourages researchers to explore the vast potential of generative techniques in spatial-temporal data mining., Comment: 19 pages

Graph augmentation with contrastive learning has gained significant attention in the field of recommendation systems due to its ability to learn expressive user representations, even when labeled data is limited. However, directly applying existing GCL models to real-world recommendation environments poses challenges. There are two primary issues to address. Firstly, the lack of consideration for data noise in contrastive learning can result in noisy self-supervised signals, leading to degraded performance. Secondly, many existing GCL approaches rely on graph neural network (GNN) architectures, which can suffer from over-smoothing problems due to non-adaptive message passing. To address these challenges, we propose a principled framework called GraphAug. This framework introduces a robust data augmentor that generates denoised self-supervised signals, enhancing recommender systems. The GraphAug framework incorporates a graph information bottleneck (GIB)-regularized augmentation paradigm, which automatically distills informative self-supervision information and adaptively adjusts contrastive view generation. Through rigorous experimentation on real-world datasets, we thoroughly assessed the performance of our novel GraphAug model. The outcomes consistently unveil its superiority over existing baseline methods. The source code for our model is publicly available at: https://github.com/HKUDS/GraphAug., Comment: 13 pages and accepted by ICDE 2024

Factual error correction (FEC) aims to revise factual errors in false claims with minimal editing, making them faithful to the provided evidence. This task is crucial for alleviating the hallucination problem encountered by large language models. Given the lack of paired data (i.e., false claims and their corresponding correct claims), existing methods typically adopt the mask-then-correct paradigm. This paradigm relies solely on unpaired false claims and correct claims, thus being referred to as distantly supervised methods. These methods require a masker to explicitly identify factual errors within false claims before revising with a corrector. However, the absence of paired data to train the masker makes accurately pinpointing factual errors within claims challenging. To mitigate this, we propose to improve FEC by Learning to Inject Factual Errors (LIFE), a three-step distantly supervised method: mask-corrupt-correct. Specifically, we first train a corruptor using the mask-then-corrupt procedure, allowing it to deliberately introduce factual errors into correct text. The corruptor is then applied to correct claims, generating a substantial amount of paired data. After that, we filter out low-quality data, and use the remaining data to train a corrector. Notably, our corrector does not require a masker, thus circumventing the bottleneck associated with explicit factual error identification. Our experiments on a public dataset verify the effectiveness of LIFE in two key aspects: Firstly, it outperforms the previous best-performing distantly supervised method by a notable margin of 10.59 points in SARI Final (19.3% improvement). Secondly, even compared to ChatGPT prompted with in-context examples, LIFE achieves a superiority of 7.16 points in SARI Final., Comment: Accepted to AAAI 2024

Spatial-temporal graph learning has emerged as a promising solution for modeling structured spatial-temporal data and learning region representations for various urban sensing tasks such as crime forecasting and traffic flow prediction. However, most existing models are vulnerable to the quality of the generated region graph due to the inaccurate graph-structured information aggregation schema. The ubiquitous spatial-temporal data noise and incompleteness in real-life scenarios pose challenges in generating high-quality region representations. To address this challenge, we propose a new spatial-temporal graph learning model (GraphST) for enabling effective self-supervised learning. Our proposed model is an adversarial contrastive learning paradigm that automates the distillation of crucial multi-view self-supervised information for robust spatial-temporal graph augmentation. We empower GraphST to adaptively identify hard samples for better self-supervision, enhancing the representation discrimination ability and robustness. In addition, we introduce a cross-view contrastive learning paradigm to model the inter-dependencies across view-specific region representations and preserve underlying relation heterogeneity. We demonstrate the superiority of our proposed GraphST method in various spatial-temporal prediction tasks on real-life datasets. We release our model implementation via the link: \url{https://github.com/HKUDS/GraphST}., Comment: This paper is accepted by ICML 2023

Among various region embedding methods, graph-based region relation learning models stand out, owing to their strong structure representation ability for encoding spatial correlations with graph neural networks. Despite their effectiveness, several key challenges have not been well addressed in existing methods: i) Data noise and missing are ubiquitous in many spatio-temporal scenarios due to a variety of factors. ii) Input spatio-temporal data (e.g., mobility traces) usually exhibits distribution heterogeneity across space and time. In such cases, current methods are vulnerable to the quality of the generated region graphs, which may lead to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we tackle the above challenges by exploring the Automated Spatio-Temporal graph contrastive learning paradigm (AutoST) over the heterogeneous region graph generated from multi-view data sources. Our \model\ framework is built upon a heterogeneous graph neural architecture to capture the multi-view region dependencies with respect to POI semantics, mobility flow patterns and geographical positions. To improve the robustness of our GNN encoder against data noise and distribution issues, we design an automated spatio-temporal augmentation scheme with a parameterized contrastive view generator. AutoST can adapt to the spatio-temporal heterogeneous graph with multi-view semantics well preserved. Extensive experiments for three downstream spatio-temporal mining tasks on several real-world datasets demonstrate the significant performance gain achieved by our \model\ over a variety of baselines. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/HKUDS/AutoST., Comment: This paper is in the proceedings of WWW'2023

mRNA therapy is gaining worldwide attention as an emerging therapeutic approach. The widespread use of mRNA vaccines during the COVID-19 outbreak has demonstrated the potential of mRNA therapy. As mRNA-based drugs have expanded and their indications have broadened, more patents for mRNA innovations have emerged. The global patent landscape for mRNA therapy has not yet been analyzed, indicating a research gap in need of filling, from new technology to productization. This study uses social network analysis with the patent quality assessment to investigate the temporal trends, citation relationship, and significant litigation for 16,101 mRNA therapy patents and summarizes the hot topics and potential future directions for this industry. The information obtained in this study not only may be utilized as a tool of knowledge for researchers in a comprehensive and integrated way but can also provide inspiration for efficient production methods for mRNA drugs. This study shows that infectious diseases and cancer are currently the primary applications for mRNA drugs. Emerging patent activity and lawsuits in this field are demonstrating that delivery technology remains one of the key challenges in the field and that drug-targeting research in combination with vector technology will be one of the major directions for the industry going forward. With significant funding, new organizations have developed novel delivery technologies in an attempt to break into the patent thicket established by companies such as Arbutus. The global mRNA therapeutic landscape is undergoing a multifaceted development pattern, and the monopoly of giant companies is being challenged., Comment: I have received requests from co-authors and funding agencies to withdraw the manuscript

When users move in a physical space (e.g., an urban space), they would have some records called mobility records (e.g., trajectories) generated by devices such as mobile phones and GPS devices. Naturally, mobility records capture essential information of how users work, live and entertain in their daily lives, and therefore, they have been used in a wide range of tasks such as user profile inference, mobility prediction and traffic management. In this paper, we expand this line of research by investigating the problem of inferring user socioeconomic statuses (such as prices of users' living houses as a proxy of users' socioeconomic statuses) based on their mobility records, which can potentially be used in real-life applications such as the car loan business. For this task, we propose a socioeconomic-aware deep model called DeepSEI. The DeepSEI model incorporates two networks called deep network and recurrent network, which extract the features of the mobility records from three aspects, namely spatiality, temporality and activity, one at a coarse level and the other at a detailed level. We conduct extensive experiments on real mobility records data, POI data and house prices data. The results verify that the DeepSEI model achieves superior performance than existing studies. All datasets used in this paper will be made publicly available., Comment: IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2022)

Detecting anomalous trajectories has become an important task in many location-based applications. While many approaches have been proposed for this task, they suffer from various issues including (1) incapability of detecting anomalous subtrajectories, which are finer-grained anomalies in trajectory data, and/or (2) non-data driven, and/or (3) requirement of sufficient supervision labels which are costly to collect. In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement learning based solution called RL4OASD, which avoids all aforementioned issues of existing approaches. RL4OASD involves two networks, one responsible for learning features of road networks and trajectories and the other responsible for detecting anomalous subtrajectories based on the learned features, and the two networks can be trained iteratively without labeled data. Extensive experiments are conducted on two real datasets, and the results show that our solution can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art methods (with 20-30% improvement) and is efficient for online detection (it takes less than 0.1ms to process each newly generated data point).

Autonomous motion planning is challenging in multi-obstacle environments due to nonconvex collision avoidance constraints. Directly applying numerical solvers to these nonconvex formulations fails to exploit the constraint structures, resulting in excessive computation time. In this paper, we present an accelerated collision-free motion planner, namely regularized dual alternating direction method of multipliers (RDADMM or RDA for short), for the model predictive control (MPC) based motion planning problem. The proposed RDA addresses nonconvex motion planning via solving a smooth biconvex reformulation via duality and allows the collision avoidance constraints to be computed in parallel for each obstacle to reduce computation time significantly. We validate the performance of the RDA planner through path-tracking experiments with car-like robots in both simulation and real-world settings. Experimental results show that the proposed method generates smooth collision-free trajectories with less computation time compared with other benchmarks and performs robustly in cluttered environments. The source code is available at https://github.com/hanruihua/RDA_planner., Comment: Published in: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters ( Volume: 8, Issue: 3, March 2023) (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10036019)

In this work, we introduce an inverse averaging finite element method (IAFEM) for solving the size-modified Poisson-Nernst-Planck (SMPNP) equations. Comparing with the classical Poisson-Nernst-Planck (PNP) equations, the SMPNP equations add a nonlinear term to each of the Nernst-Planck (NP) fluxes to describe the steric repulsion which can treat multiple nonuniform particle sizes in simulations. Since the new terms include sums and gradients of ion concentrations, the nonlinear coupling of SMPNP equations is much stronger than that of PNP equations. By introducing a generalized Slotboom transform, each of the size-modified NP equation is transformed into a self-adjoint equation with exponentially behaved coefficient, which has similar simple form to the standard NP equation with the Slotboom transformation. This treatment enables employing our recently developed inverse averaging technique to deal with the exponential coefficients of the reformulated formulations, featured with advantages of numerical stability and flux conservation especially in strong nonlinear and convection-dominated cases. Comparing with previous stabilization methods, the IAFEM proposed in this paper can still possess the numerical stability when dealing with convection-dominated problems. And it is more concise and easier to be numerically implemented. Numerical experiments about a model problem with analytic solutions are presented to verify the accuracy and order of IAFEM for SMPNP equations. Studies about the size-effects of a sphere model and an ion channel system are presented to show that our IAFEM is more effective and robust than the traditional finite element method (FEM) when solving SMPNP equations in simulations of biological systems., Comment: 29 pages, 10 figures

Quality control is of vital importance during electronics production. As the methods of producing electronic circuits improve, there is an increasing chance of solder defects during assembling the printed circuit board (PCB). Many technologies have been incorporated for inspecting failed soldering, such as X-ray imaging, optical imaging, and thermal imaging. With some advanced algorithms, the new technologies are expected to control the production quality based on the digital images. However, current algorithms sometimes are not accurate enough to meet the quality control. Specialists are needed to do a follow-up checking. For automated X-ray inspection, joint of interest on the X-ray image is located by region of interest (ROI) and inspected by some algorithms. Some incorrect ROIs deteriorate the inspection algorithm. The high dimension of X-ray images and the varying sizes of image dimensions also challenge the inspection algorithms. On the other hand, recent advances on deep learning shed light on image-based tasks and are competitive to human levels. In this paper, deep learning is incorporated in X-ray imaging based quality control during PCB quality inspection. Two artificial intelligence (AI) based models are proposed and compared for joint defect detection. The noised ROI problem and the varying sizes of imaging dimension problem are addressed. The efficacy of the proposed methods are verified through experimenting on a real-world 3D X-ray dataset. By incorporating the proposed methods, specialist inspection workload is largely saved., Comment: Accepted by conference INDIN 2020

Graph similarity computation aims to predict a similarity score between one pair of graphs to facilitate downstream applications, such as finding the most similar chemical compounds similar to a query compound or Fewshot 3D Action Recognition. Recently, some graph similarity computation models based on neural networks have been proposed, which are either based on graph-level interaction or node-level comparison. However, when the number of nodes in the graph increases, it will inevitably bring about reduced representation ability or high computation cost. Motivated by this observation, we propose a graph partitioning and graph neural network-based model, called PSimGNN, to effectively resolve this issue. Specifically, each of the input graphs is partitioned into a set of subgraphs to extract the local structural features directly. Next, a novel graph neural network with an attention mechanism is designed to map each subgraph into an embedding vector. Some of these subgraph pairs are automatically selected for node-level comparison to supplement the subgraph-level embedding with fine-grained information. Finally, coarse-grained interaction information among subgraphs and fine-grained comparison information among nodes in different subgraphs are integrated to predict the final similarity score. Experimental results on graph datasets with different graph sizes demonstrate that PSimGNN outperforms state-of-the-art methods in graph similarity computation tasks using approximate Graph Edit Distance (GED) as the graph similarity metric.

In many real-time applications, the deployment of deep neural networks is constrained by high computational cost and efficient lightweight neural networks are widely concerned. In this paper, we propose that depthwise convolution (DWC) is used to expand the number of channels in a bottleneck block, which is more efficient than 1 x 1 convolution. The proposed Pointwise-Standard-Depthwise network (PSDNet) based on channel expansion with DWC has fewer number of parameters, less computational cost and higher accuracy than corresponding ResNet on CIFAR datasets. To design more efficient lightweight concolutional neural netwok, Depthwise-Pointwise-Depthwise inverted bottleneck block (DPD block) is proposed and DPDNet is designed by stacking DPD block. Meanwhile, the number of parameters of DPDNet is only about 60% of that of MobileNetV2 for networks with the same number of layers, but can achieve approximated accuracy. Additionally, two hyperparameters of DPDNet can make the trade-off between accuracy and computational cost, which makes DPDNet suitable for diverse tasks. Furthermore, we find the networks with more DWC layers outperform the networks with more 1x1 convolution layers, which indicates that extracting spatial information is more important than combining channel information.

In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown great performance in various fields such as image classification, pattern recognition, and multi-media compression. Two of the feature properties, local connectivity and weight sharing, can reduce the number of parameters and increase processing speed during training and inference. However, as the dimension of data becomes higher and the CNN architecture becomes more complicated, the end-to-end approach or the combined manner of CNN is computationally intensive, which becomes limitation to CNN's further implementation. Therefore, it is necessary and urgent to implement CNN in a faster way. In this paper, we first summarize the acceleration methods that contribute to but not limited to CNN by reviewing a broad variety of research papers. We propose a taxonomy in terms of three levels, i.e.~structure level, algorithm level, and implementation level, for acceleration methods. We also analyze the acceleration methods in terms of CNN architecture compression, algorithm optimization, and hardware-based improvement. At last, we give a discussion on different perspectives of these acceleration and optimization methods within each level. The discussion shows that the methods in each level still have large exploration space. By incorporating such a wide range of disciplines, we expect to provide a comprehensive reference for researchers who are interested in CNN acceleration., Comment: submitted to Neurocomputing