柱生成（CG）是解决大规模优化问题的有效方法。CG通过求解列（即变量）的子集并逐渐包括可以改善当前子问题的解决方案的新列。通过反复解决定价问题，根据需要产生新列，这通常是NP - 硬的并且是CG方法的瓶颈。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了一种基于机器学习的定价启发式（MLPH），可以有效地产生许多高质量的柱。在CG的每次迭代中，我们的MLPH利用ML模型来预测定价问题的最佳解决方案，然后用于引导采样方法以有效地产生多个高质量柱。使用图形着色问题，我们经验证明，与六种最先进的方法相比，MLPH显着增强，并且CG的改善可能导致分支和价格精确方法的显着更好的性能。

本文介绍了一种增强的元启发式（ML-ACO），将机器学习（ML）和蚁群优化（ACO）结合起来解决组合优化问题。为了说明我们ML-ACO算法的底层机制，我们首先描述测试问题，定向问题。在这个问题中，目的是找到一个路线，该路线在时间预算中在图中访问顶点的子集，以最大化收集的分数。在我们ML-ACO算法的第一阶段，使用一组小问题实例训练ML模型，其中已知最佳解决方案。具体地，分类模型用于将边缘分类为最佳路由的一部分，或不使用特定于问题的特征和统计测量。然后，训练模型用于预测测试问题实例图表中的边缘所属的概率属于相应的最优路由。在第二阶段，我们将预测的概率纳入我们算法的ACO组件，即，使用概率值作为启发式权重或者热启动信息素矩阵。这里，在构建可行的路线时偏向有利于这些预测的高质量边缘的概率值。我们已经测试了多种分类模型，包括图形神经网络，逻辑回归和支持向量机，实验结果表明，我们的解决方案预测方法一直促进ACO的性能。此外，我们经验证明我们在小型合成实例上培训的ML模型概括为大型合成和现实世界的情况。我们将ML与META-HEURISTIC集成的方法是通用的，可以应用于各种优化问题。

Dataset distillation has emerged as a prominent technique to improve data efficiency when training machine learning models. It encapsulates the knowledge from a large dataset into a smaller synthetic dataset. A model trained on this smaller distilled dataset can attain comparable performance to a model trained on the original training dataset. However, the existing dataset distillation techniques mainly aim at achieving the best trade-off between resource usage efficiency and model utility. The security risks stemming from them have not been explored. This study performs the first backdoor attack against the models trained on the data distilled by dataset distillation models in the image domain. Concretely, we inject triggers into the synthetic data during the distillation procedure rather than during the model training stage, where all previous attacks are performed. We propose two types of backdoor attacks, namely NAIVEATTACK and DOORPING. NAIVEATTACK simply adds triggers to the raw data at the initial distillation phase, while DOORPING iteratively updates the triggers during the entire distillation procedure. We conduct extensive evaluations on multiple datasets, architectures, and dataset distillation techniques. Empirical evaluation shows that NAIVEATTACK achieves decent attack success rate (ASR) scores in some cases, while DOORPING reaches higher ASR scores (close to 1.0) in all cases. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive ablation study to analyze the factors that may affect the attack performance. Finally, we evaluate multiple defense mechanisms against our backdoor attacks and show that our attacks can practically circumvent these defense mechanisms.

Few Shot Instance Segmentation (FSIS) requires models to detect and segment novel classes with limited several support examples. In this work, we explore a simple yet unified solution for FSIS as well as its incremental variants, and introduce a new framework named Reference Twice (RefT) to fully explore the relationship between support/query features based on a Transformer-like framework. Our key insights are two folds: Firstly, with the aid of support masks, we can generate dynamic class centers more appropriately to re-weight query features. Secondly, we find that support object queries have already encoded key factors after base training. In this way, the query features can be enhanced twice from two aspects, i.e., feature-level and instance-level. In particular, we firstly design a mask-based dynamic weighting module to enhance support features and then propose to link object queries for better calibration via cross-attention. After the above steps, the novel classes can be improved significantly over our strong baseline. Additionally, our new framework can be easily extended to incremental FSIS with minor modification. When benchmarking results on the COCO dataset for FSIS, gFSIS, and iFSIS settings, our method achieves a competitive performance compared to existing approaches across different shots, e.g., we boost nAP by noticeable +8.2/+9.4 over the current state-of-the-art FSIS method for 10/30-shot. We further demonstrate the superiority of our approach on Few Shot Object Detection. Code and model will be available.

Nowadays, time-stamped web documents related to a general news query floods spread throughout the Internet, and timeline summarization targets concisely summarizing the evolution trajectory of events along the timeline. Unlike traditional document summarization, timeline summarization needs to model the time series information of the input events and summarize important events in chronological order. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we propose a Unified Timeline Summarizer (UTS) that can generate abstractive and extractive timeline summaries in time order. Concretely, in the encoder part, we propose a graph-based event encoder that relates multiple events according to their content dependency and learns a global representation of each event. In the decoder part, to ensure the chronological order of the abstractive summary, we propose to extract the feature of event-level attention in its generation process with sequential information remained and use it to simulate the evolutionary attention of the ground truth summary. The event-level attention can also be used to assist in extracting summary, where the extracted summary also comes in time sequence. We augment the previous Chinese large-scale timeline summarization dataset and collect a new English timeline dataset. Extensive experiments conducted on these datasets and on the out-of-domain Timeline 17 dataset show that UTS achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both automatic and human evaluations.

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.

In this paper, we investigate the joint device activity and data detection in massive machine-type communications (mMTC) with a one-phase non-coherent scheme, where data bits are embedded in the pilot sequences and the base station simultaneously detects active devices and their embedded data bits without explicit channel estimation. Due to the correlated sparsity pattern introduced by the non-coherent transmission scheme, the traditional approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm cannot achieve satisfactory performance. Therefore, we propose a deep learning (DL) modified AMP network (DL-mAMPnet) that enhances the detection performance by effectively exploiting the pilot activity correlation. The DL-mAMPnet is constructed by unfolding the AMP algorithm into a feedforward neural network, which combines the principled mathematical model of the AMP algorithm with the powerful learning capability, thereby benefiting from the advantages of both techniques. Trainable parameters are introduced in the DL-mAMPnet to approximate the correlated sparsity pattern and the large-scale fading coefficient. Moreover, a refinement module is designed to further advance the performance by utilizing the spatial feature caused by the correlated sparsity pattern. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DL-mAMPnet can significantly outperform traditional algorithms in terms of the symbol error rate performance.

Deploying reliable deep learning techniques in interdisciplinary applications needs learned models to output accurate and ({even more importantly}) explainable predictions. Existing approaches typically explicate network outputs in a post-hoc fashion, under an implicit assumption that faithful explanations come from accurate predictions/classifications. We have an opposite claim that explanations boost (or even determine) classification. That is, end-to-end learning of explanation factors to augment discriminative representation extraction could be a more intuitive strategy to inversely assure fine-grained explainability, e.g., in those neuroimaging and neuroscience studies with high-dimensional data containing noisy, redundant, and task-irrelevant information. In this paper, we propose such an explainable geometric deep network dubbed as NeuroExplainer, with applications to uncover altered infant cortical development patterns associated with preterm birth. Given fundamental cortical attributes as network input, our NeuroExplainer adopts a hierarchical attention-decoding framework to learn fine-grained attentions and respective discriminative representations to accurately recognize preterm infants from term-born infants at term-equivalent age. NeuroExplainer learns the hierarchical attention-decoding modules under subject-level weak supervision coupled with targeted regularizers deduced from domain knowledge regarding brain development. These prior-guided constraints implicitly maximizes the explainability metrics (i.e., fidelity, sparsity, and stability) in network training, driving the learned network to output detailed explanations and accurate classifications. Experimental results on the public dHCP benchmark suggest that NeuroExplainer led to quantitatively reliable explanation results that are qualitatively consistent with representative neuroimaging studies.

Medical image segmentation (MIS) is essential for supporting disease diagnosis and treatment effect assessment. Despite considerable advances in artificial intelligence (AI) for MIS, clinicians remain skeptical of its utility, maintaining low confidence in such black box systems, with this problem being exacerbated by low generalization for out-of-distribution (OOD) data. To move towards effective clinical utilization, we propose a foundation model named EvidenceCap, which makes the box transparent in a quantifiable way by uncertainty estimation. EvidenceCap not only makes AI visible in regions of uncertainty and OOD data, but also enhances the reliability, robustness, and computational efficiency of MIS. Uncertainty is modeled explicitly through subjective logic theory to gather strong evidence from features. We show the effectiveness of EvidenceCap in three segmentation datasets and apply it to the clinic. Our work sheds light on clinical safe applications and explainable AI, and can contribute towards trustworthiness in the medical domain.

Novel topological spin textures, such as magnetic skyrmions, benefit from their inherent stability, acting as the ground state in several magnetic systems. In the current study of atomic monolayer magnetic materials, reasonable initial guesses are still needed to search for those magnetic patterns. This situation underlines the need to develop a more effective way to identify the ground states. To solve this problem, in this work, we propose a genetic-tunneling-driven variance-controlled optimization approach, which combines a local energy minimizer back-end and a metaheuristic global searching front-end. This algorithm is an effective optimization solution for searching for magnetic ground states at extremely low temperatures and is also robust for finding low-energy degenerated states at finite temperatures. We demonstrate here the success of this method in searching for magnetic ground states of 2D monolayer systems with both artificial and calculated interactions from density functional theory. It is also worth noting that the inherent concurrent property of this algorithm can significantly decrease the execution time. In conclusion, our proposed method builds a useful tool for low-dimensional magnetic system energy optimization.