In this tutorial paper, we look into the evolution and prospect of network architecture and propose a novel conceptual architecture for the 6th generation (6G) networks. The proposed architecture has two key elements, i.e., holistic network virtualization and pervasive artificial intelligence (AI). The holistic network virtualization consists of network slicing and digital twin, from the aspects of service provision and service demand, respectively, to incorporate service-centric and user-centric networking. The pervasive network intelligence integrates AI into future networks from the perspectives of networking for AI and AI for networking, respectively. Building on holistic network virtualization and pervasive network intelligence, the proposed architecture can facilitate three types of interplay, i.e., the interplay between digital twin and network slicing paradigms, between model-driven and data-driven methods for network management, and between virtualization and AI, to maximize the flexibility, scalability, adaptivity, and intelligence for 6G networks. We also identify challenges and open issues related to the proposed architecture. By providing our vision, we aim to inspire further discussions and developments on the potential architecture of 6G.

Collaboration among industrial Internet of Things (IoT) devices and edge networks is essential to support computation-intensive deep neural network (DNN) inference services which require low delay and high accuracy. Sampling rate adaption which dynamically configures the sampling rates of industrial IoT devices according to network conditions, is the key in minimizing the service delay. In this paper, we investigate the collaborative DNN inference problem in industrial IoT networks. To capture the channel variation and task arrival randomness, we formulate the problem as a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). Specifically, sampling rate adaption, inference task offloading and edge computing resource allocation are jointly considered to minimize the average service delay while guaranteeing the long-term accuracy requirements of different inference services. Since CMDP cannot be directly solved by general reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms due to the intractable long-term constraints, we first transform the CMDP into an MDP by leveraging the Lyapunov optimization technique. Then, a deep RL-based algorithm is proposed to solve the MDP. To expedite the training process, an optimization subroutine is embedded in the proposed algorithm to directly obtain the optimal edge computing resource allocation. Extensive simulation results are provided to demonstrate that the proposed RL-based algorithm can significantly reduce the average service delay while preserving long-term inference accuracy with a high probability.

Our situated environment is full of uncertainty and highly dynamic, thus hindering the widespread adoption of machine-led Intelligent Decision-Making (IDM) in real world scenarios. This means IDM should have the capability of continuously learning new skills and efficiently generalizing across wider applications. IDM benefits from any new approaches and theoretical breakthroughs that exhibit Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) breaking the barriers between tasks and applications. Recent research has well-examined neural architecture, Transformer, as a backbone foundation model and its generalization to various tasks, including computer vision, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning. We therefore argue that a foundation decision model (FDM) can be established by formulating various decision-making tasks as a sequence decoding task using the Transformer architecture; this would be a promising solution to advance the applications of IDM in more complex real world tasks. In this paper, we elaborate on how a foundation decision model improves the efficiency and generalization of IDM. We also discuss potential applications of a FDM in multi-agent game AI, production scheduling, and robotics tasks. Finally, through a case study, we demonstrate our realization of the FDM, DigitalBrain (DB1) with 1.2 billion parameters, which achieves human-level performance over 453 tasks, including text generation, images caption, video games playing, robotic control, and traveling salesman problems. As a foundation decision model, DB1 would be a baby step towards more autonomous and efficient real world IDM applications.

In recent years, graph representation learning has achieved remarkable success while suffering from low-quality data problems. As a mature technology to improve data quality in computer vision, data augmentation has also attracted increasing attention in graph domain. For promoting the development of this emerging research direction, in this survey, we comprehensively review and summarize the existing graph data augmentation (GDAug) techniques. Specifically, we first summarize a variety of feasible taxonomies, and then classify existing GDAug studies based on fine-grained graph elements. Furthermore, for each type of GDAug technique, we formalize the general definition, discuss the technical details, and give schematic illustration. In addition, we also summarize common performance metrics and specific design metrics for constructing a GDAug evaluation system. Finally, we summarize the applications of GDAug from both data and model levels, as well as future directions.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Although pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown impressive performance by text-only self-supervised training, they are found lack of visual semantics or commonsense, e.g., sizes, shapes, and colors of commonplace objects. Existing solutions often rely on explicit images for visual knowledge augmentation (requiring time-consuming retrieval or generation), and they also conduct the augmentation for the whole input text, without considering whether it is actually needed in specific inputs or tasks. To address these issues, we propose a novel visually-augmented fine-tuning approach that can be generally applied to various PLMs or NLP tasks, without using any retrieved or generated images, namely VAWI. Specifically, we first identify the visually-hungry words (VH-words) from input text via a token selector, where three different methods have been proposed, including syntax-, attention- and learning-based strategies. Then, we adopt a fixed CLIP text encoder to generate the visually-augmented representations of these VH-words. As it has been pre-trained by vision-language alignment task on the large-scale corpus, it is capable of injecting visual semantics into the aligned text representations. Finally, the visually-augmented features will be fused and transformed into the pre-designed visual prompts based on VH-words, which can be inserted into PLMs to enrich the visual semantics in word representations. We conduct extensive experiments on ten NLP tasks, i.e., GLUE benchmark, CommonsenseQA, CommonGen, and SNLI-VE. Experimental results show that our approach can consistently improve the performance of BERT, RoBERTa, BART, and T5 at different scales, and outperform several competitive baselines significantly. Our codes and data are publicly available at~\url{https://github.com/RUCAIBox/VAWI}.

Dense retrieval aims to map queries and passages into low-dimensional vector space for efficient similarity measuring, showing promising effectiveness in various large-scale retrieval tasks. Since most existing methods commonly adopt pre-trained Transformers (e.g. BERT) for parameter initialization, some work focuses on proposing new pre-training tasks for compressing the useful semantic information from passages into dense vectors, achieving remarkable performances. However, it is still challenging to effectively capture the rich semantic information and relations about passages into the dense vectors via one single particular pre-training task. In this work, we propose a multi-task pre-trained model, MASTER, that unifies and integrates multiple pre-training tasks with different learning objectives under the bottlenecked masked autoencoder architecture. Concretely, MASTER utilizes a multi-decoder architecture to integrate three types of pre-training tasks: corrupted passages recovering, related passage recovering and PLMs outputs recovering. By incorporating a shared deep encoder, we construct a representation bottleneck in our architecture, compressing the abundant semantic information across tasks into dense vectors. The first two types of tasks concentrate on capturing the semantic information of passages and relationships among them within the pre-training corpus. The third one can capture the knowledge beyond the corpus from external PLMs (e.g. GPT-2). Extensive experiments on several large-scale passage retrieval datasets have shown that our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art dense retrieval methods. Our code and data are publicly released in https://github.com/microsoft/SimXNS

Copy-Paste is a simple and effective data augmentation strategy for instance segmentation. By randomly pasting object instances onto new background images, it creates new training data for free and significantly boosts the segmentation performance, especially for rare object categories. Although diverse, high-quality object instances used in Copy-Paste result in more performance gain, previous works utilize object instances either from human-annotated instance segmentation datasets or rendered from 3D object models, and both approaches are too expensive to scale up to obtain good diversity. In this paper, we revisit Copy-Paste at scale with the power of newly emerged zero-shot recognition models (e.g., CLIP) and text2image models (e.g., StableDiffusion). We demonstrate for the first time that using a text2image model to generate images or zero-shot recognition model to filter noisily crawled images for different object categories is a feasible way to make Copy-Paste truly scalable. To make such success happen, we design a data acquisition and processing framework, dubbed "X-Paste", upon which a systematic study is conducted. On the LVIS dataset, X-Paste provides impressive improvements over the strong baseline CenterNet2 with Swin-L as the backbone. Specifically, it archives +2.6 box AP and +2.1 mask AP gains on all classes and even more significant gains with +6.8 box AP +6.5 mask AP on long-tail classes.

Multi-hop Question Answering over Knowledge Graph~(KGQA) aims to find the answer entities that are multiple hops away from the topic entities mentioned in a natural language question on a large-scale Knowledge Graph (KG). To cope with the vast search space, existing work usually adopts a two-stage approach: it firstly retrieves a relatively small subgraph related to the question and then performs the reasoning on the subgraph to accurately find the answer entities. Although these two stages are highly related, previous work employs very different technical solutions for developing the retrieval and reasoning models, neglecting their relatedness in task essence. In this paper, we propose UniKGQA, a novel approach for multi-hop KGQA task, by unifying retrieval and reasoning in both model architecture and parameter learning. For model architecture, UniKGQA consists of a semantic matching module based on a pre-trained language model~(PLM) for question-relation semantic matching, and a matching information propagation module to propagate the matching information along the edges on KGs. For parameter learning, we design a shared pre-training task based on question-relation matching for both retrieval and reasoning models, and then propose retrieval- and reasoning-oriented fine-tuning strategies. Compared with previous studies, our approach is more unified, tightly relating the retrieval and reasoning stages. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method on the multi-hop KGQA task. Our codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/UniKGQA.

From the perspective of constructing the classification model, this paper uses the weight coefficient (influencing factors) in the model to analyze the sales impact on different brands of electric vehicles, and optimizes the existing sales strategy.