The development of social media user stance detection and bot detection methods rely heavily on large-scale and high-quality benchmarks. However, in addition to low annotation quality, existing benchmarks generally have incomplete user relationships, suppressing graph-based account detection research. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-Relational Graph-Based Twitter Account Detection Benchmark (MGTAB), the first standardized graph-based benchmark for account detection. To our knowledge, MGTAB was built based on the largest original data in the field, with over 1.55 million users and 130 million tweets. MGTAB contains 10,199 expert-annotated users and 7 types of relationships, ensuring high-quality annotation and diversified relations. In MGTAB, we extracted the 20 user property features with the greatest information gain and user tweet features as the user features. In addition, we performed a thorough evaluation of MGTAB and other public datasets. Our experiments found that graph-based approaches are generally more effective than feature-based approaches and perform better when introducing multiple relations. By analyzing experiment results, we identify effective approaches for account detection and provide potential future research directions in this field. Our benchmark and standardized evaluation procedures are freely available at: https://github.com/GraphDetec/MGTAB.

Compressed videos often exhibit visually annoying artifacts, known as Perceivable Encoding Artifacts (PEAs), which dramatically degrade video visual quality. Subjective and objective measures capable of identifying and quantifying various types of PEAs are critical in improving visual quality. In this paper, we investigate the influence of four spatial PEAs (i.e. blurring, blocking, bleeding, and ringing) and two temporal PEAs (i.e. flickering and floating) on video quality. For spatial artifacts, we propose a visual saliency model with a low computational cost and higher consistency with human visual perception. In terms of temporal artifacts, self-attention based TimeSFormer is improved to detect temporal artifacts. Based on the six types of PEAs, a quality metric called Saliency-Aware Spatio-Temporal Artifacts Measurement (SSTAM) is proposed. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art metrics. We believe that SSTAM will be beneficial for optimizing video coding techniques.

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE), which maps entities and relations in a knowledge graph into continuous vector spaces, has achieved great success in predicting missing links in knowledge graphs. However, knowledge graphs often contain incomplete triples that are difficult to inductively infer by KGEs. To address this challenge, we resort to analogical inference and propose a novel and general self-supervised framework AnKGE to enhance KGE models with analogical inference capability. We propose an analogical object retriever that retrieves appropriate analogical objects from entity-level, relation-level, and triple-level. And in AnKGE, we train an analogy function for each level of analogical inference with the original element embedding from a well-trained KGE model as input, which outputs the analogical object embedding. In order to combine inductive inference capability from the original KGE model and analogical inference capability enhanced by AnKGE, we interpolate the analogy score with the base model score and introduce the adaptive weights in the score function for prediction. Through extensive experiments on FB15k-237 and WN18RR datasets, we show that AnKGE achieves competitive results on link prediction task and well performs analogical inference.

Interview has been regarded as one of the most crucial step for recruitment. To fully prepare for the interview with the recruiters, job seekers usually practice with mock interviews between each other. However, such a mock interview with peers is generally far away from the real interview experience: the mock interviewers are not guaranteed to be professional and are not likely to behave like a real interviewer. Due to the rapid growth of online recruitment in recent years, recruiters tend to have online interviews, which makes it possible to collect real interview data from real interviewers. In this paper, we propose a novel application named EZInterviewer, which aims to learn from the online interview data and provides mock interview services to the job seekers. The task is challenging in two ways: (1) the interview data are now available but still of low-resource; (2) to generate meaningful and relevant interview dialogs requires thorough understanding of both resumes and job descriptions. To address the low-resource challenge, EZInterviewer is trained on a very small set of interview dialogs. The key idea is to reduce the number of parameters that rely on interview dialogs by disentangling the knowledge selector and dialog generator so that most parameters can be trained with ungrounded dialogs as well as the resume data that are not low-resource. Evaluation results on a real-world job interview dialog dataset indicate that we achieve promising results to generate mock interviews. With the help of EZInterviewer, we hope to make mock interview practice become easier for job seekers.

Image Virtual try-on aims at replacing the cloth on a personal image with a garment image (in-shop clothes), which has attracted increasing attention from the multimedia and computer vision communities. Prior methods successfully preserve the character of clothing images, however, occlusion remains a pernicious effect for realistic virtual try-on. In this work, we first present a comprehensive analysis of the occlusions and categorize them into two aspects: i) Inherent-Occlusion: the ghost of the former cloth still exists in the try-on image; ii) Acquired-Occlusion: the target cloth warps to the unreasonable body part. Based on the in-depth analysis, we find that the occlusions can be simulated by a novel semantically-guided mixup module, which can generate semantic-specific occluded images that work together with the try-on images to facilitate training a de-occlusion try-on (DOC-VTON) framework. Specifically, DOC-VTON first conducts a sharpened semantic parsing on the try-on person. Aided by semantics guidance and pose prior, various complexities of texture are selectively blending with human parts in a copy-and-paste manner. Then, the Generative Module (GM) is utilized to take charge of synthesizing the final try-on image and learning to de-occlusion jointly. In comparison to the state-of-the-art methods, DOC-VTON achieves better perceptual quality by reducing occlusion effects.

Recent advances in self-supervised learning (SSL) in computer vision are primarily comparative, whose goal is to preserve invariant and discriminative semantics in latent representations by comparing siamese image views. However, the preserved high-level semantics do not contain enough local information, which is vital in medical image analysis (e.g., image-based diagnosis and tumor segmentation). To mitigate the locality problem of comparative SSL, we propose to incorporate the task of pixel restoration for explicitly encoding more pixel-level information into high-level semantics. We also address the preservation of scale information, a powerful tool in aiding image understanding but has not drawn much attention in SSL. The resulting framework can be formulated as a multi-task optimization problem on the feature pyramid. Specifically, we conduct multi-scale pixel restoration and siamese feature comparison in the pyramid. In addition, we propose non-skip U-Net to build the feature pyramid and develop sub-crop to replace multi-crop in 3D medical imaging. The proposed unified SSL framework (PCRLv2) surpasses its self-supervised counterparts on various tasks, including brain tumor segmentation (BraTS 2018), chest pathology identification (ChestX-ray, CheXpert), pulmonary nodule detection (LUNA), and abdominal organ segmentation (LiTS), sometimes outperforming them by large margins with limited annotations.

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) are emerging in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis because of their strong capability of generating high-fidelity samples. However, their iterative refinement process in high-dimensional data space results in slow inference speed, which restricts their application in real-time systems. Previous works have explored speeding up by minimizing the number of inference steps but at the cost of sample quality. In this work, to improve the inference speed for DDPM-based TTS model while achieving high sample quality, we propose ResGrad, a lightweight diffusion model which learns to refine the output spectrogram of an existing TTS model (e.g., FastSpeech 2) by predicting the residual between the model output and the corresponding ground-truth speech. ResGrad has several advantages: 1) Compare with other acceleration methods for DDPM which need to synthesize speech from scratch, ResGrad reduces the complexity of task by changing the generation target from ground-truth mel-spectrogram to the residual, resulting into a more lightweight model and thus a smaller real-time factor. 2) ResGrad is employed in the inference process of the existing TTS model in a plug-and-play way, without re-training this model. We verify ResGrad on the single-speaker dataset LJSpeech and two more challenging datasets with multiple speakers (LibriTTS) and high sampling rate (VCTK). Experimental results show that in comparison with other speed-up methods of DDPMs: 1) ResGrad achieves better sample quality with the same inference speed measured by real-time factor; 2) with similar speech quality, ResGrad synthesizes speech faster than baseline methods by more than 10 times. Audio samples are available at https://resgrad1.github.io/.

With an ever-growing number of parameters defining increasingly complex networks, Deep Learning has led to several breakthroughs surpassing human performance. As a result, data movement for these millions of model parameters causes a growing imbalance known as the memory wall. Neuromorphic computing is an emerging paradigm that confronts this imbalance by performing computations directly in analog memories. On the software side, the sequential Backpropagation algorithm prevents efficient parallelization and thus fast convergence. A novel method, Direct Feedback Alignment, resolves inherent layer dependencies by directly passing the error from the output to each layer. At the intersection of hardware/software co-design, there is a demand for developing algorithms that are tolerable to hardware nonidealities. Therefore, this work explores the interrelationship of implementing bio-plausible learning in-situ on neuromorphic hardware, emphasizing energy, area, and latency constraints. Using the benchmarking framework DNN+NeuroSim, we investigate the impact of hardware nonidealities and quantization on algorithm performance, as well as how network topologies and algorithm-level design choices can scale latency, energy and area consumption of a chip. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to compare the impact of different learning algorithms on Compute-In-Memory-based hardware and vice versa. The best results achieved for accuracy remain Backpropagation-based, notably when facing hardware imperfections. Direct Feedback Alignment, on the other hand, allows for significant speedup due to parallelization, reducing training time by a factor approaching N for N-layered networks.

Label noise is ubiquitous in various machine learning scenarios such as self-labeling with model predictions and erroneous data annotation. Many existing approaches are based on heuristics such as sample losses, which might not be flexible enough to achieve optimal solutions. Meta learning based methods address this issue by learning a data selection function, but can be hard to optimize. In light of these pros and cons, we propose Selection-Enhanced Noisy label Training (SENT) that does not rely on meta learning while having the flexibility of being data-driven. SENT transfers the noise distribution to a clean set and trains a model to distinguish noisy labels from clean ones using model-based features. Empirically, on a wide range of tasks including text classification and speech recognition, SENT improves performance over strong baselines under the settings of self-training and label corruption.

Video representation learning has been successful in video-text pre-training for zero-shot transfer, where each sentence is trained to be close to the paired video clips in a common feature space. For long videos, given a paragraph of description where the sentences describe different segments of the video, by matching all sentence-clip pairs, the paragraph and the full video are aligned implicitly. However, such unit-level similarity measure may ignore the global temporal context over a long time span, which inevitably limits the generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a contrastive learning framework TempCLR to compare the full video and the paragraph explicitly. As the video/paragraph is formulated as a sequence of clips/sentences, under the constraint of their temporal order, we use dynamic time warping to compute the minimum cumulative cost over sentence-clip pairs as the sequence-level distance. To explore the temporal dynamics, we break the consistency of temporal order by shuffling the video clips or sentences according to the temporal granularity. In this way, we obtain the representations for clips/sentences, which perceive the temporal information and thus facilitate the sequence alignment. In addition to pre-training on the video and paragraph, our approach can also generalize on the matching between different video instances. We evaluate our approach on video retrieval, action step localization, and few-shot action recognition, and achieve consistent performance gain over all three tasks. Detailed ablation studies are provided to justify the approach design.