Covid-19-Pandemic继续在社交媒体上提出各种讨论或辩论的主题。为了探索大流行对人们生活的影响，了解公众对与大流行有关的实体（例如药物，疫苗）对社交媒体的关注和态度至关重要。但是，对现有命名实体识别（NER）或目标情感分析（TSA）数据集培训的模型具有有限的理解与COVID相关的社交媒体文本的能力有限，因为这些数据集并未从医学角度设计或注释。本文释放了Mets-COV，这是一种包含医疗实体的数据集和与COVID相关的推文中的目标情感。 Mets-COV包含10,000条带有7种实体的推文，包括4种医疗实体类型（疾病，药物，症状和疫苗）和3种通用实体类型（人，位置和组织）。为了进一步调查推文用户对特定实体的态度，选择了4种类型的实体（人，组织，药物和疫苗），并用用户情感注释，从而产生了具有9,101个实体（5,278个推文）的目标情感数据集。据我们所知，METS-COV是第一个收集与COVID相关推文的医疗实体和相应情感的数据集。我们通过广泛的实验对经典机器学习模型和最先进的深度学习模型进行基准测试。结果表明，该数据集在NER和TSA任务方面都有大量改进的空间。 METS-COV是开发更好的医学社交媒体工具并促进计算社会科学研究的重要资源，尤其是在流行病学方面。我们的数据，注释准则，基准模型和源代码公开可用（https://github.com/ylab-open/mets-cov），以确保可重复性。

场景图是一种语义表示，表达场景中对象之间的对象，属性和关系。场景图在许多交叉模态任务中起着重要作用，因为它们能够捕获图像和文本之间的交互。在本文中，我们关注场景图修改（SGM），其中需要系统来学习如何基于自然语言查询更新现有场景图。与以前重建整个场景图的方法不同，我们通过引入增量结构扩展（ISE）来将SGM作为图形扩展任务。 ISE通过逐步扩展源图来构建目标图，而无需更改未修改的结构。基于ISE，我们进一步提出了一个模型，该模型在节点预测和边缘预测之间进行迭代，从而逐渐推断出更准确和和谐的扩展决策。此外，我们构建了一个具有挑战性的数据集，该数据集包含比现有数据集更复杂的查询和更大的场景图。四个基准测试的实验证明了我们的方法的有效性，该实验超过了以前的最新模型。

由于信息和错误信息都可以在现代媒体生态系统中传播的速度，事实检查变得越来越重要。因此，研究人员一直在探索如何自动检查，使用基于自然语言处理，机器学习，知识表示以及数据库来自动检查的技术，以自动预测所称的索赔的真实性。在本文中，我们从自然语言处理中调查了自动检查源，并讨论其与相关任务和学科的联系。在此过程中，我们概述了现有数据集和模型，旨在统一给出的各种定义和识别共同概念。最后，我们突出了未来研究的挑战。

Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) remains challenging due to the diversity of distortion and image content variation, which complicate the distortion patterns crossing different scales and aggravate the difficulty of the regression problem for BIQA. However, existing BIQA methods often fail to consider multi-scale distortion patterns and image content, and little research has been done on learning strategies to make the regression model produce better performance. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective Progressive Multi-Task Image Quality Assessment (PMT-IQA) model, which contains a multi-scale feature extraction module (MS) and a progressive multi-task learning module (PMT), to help the model learn complex distortion patterns and better optimize the regression issue to align with the law of human learning process from easy to hard. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed PMT-IQA model, we conduct experiments on four widely used public datasets, and the experimental results indicate that the performance of PMT-IQA is superior to the comparison approaches, and both MS and PMT modules improve the model's performance.

It has been observed in practice that applying pruning-at-initialization methods to neural networks and training the sparsified networks can not only retain the testing performance of the original dense models, but also sometimes even slightly boost the generalization performance. Theoretical understanding for such experimental observations are yet to be developed. This work makes the first attempt to study how different pruning fractions affect the model's gradient descent dynamics and generalization. Specifically, this work considers a classification task for overparameterized two-layer neural networks, where the network is randomly pruned according to different rates at the initialization. It is shown that as long as the pruning fraction is below a certain threshold, gradient descent can drive the training loss toward zero and the network exhibits good generalization performance. More surprisingly, the generalization bound gets better as the pruning fraction gets larger. To complement this positive result, this work further shows a negative result: there exists a large pruning fraction such that while gradient descent is still able to drive the training loss toward zero (by memorizing noise), the generalization performance is no better than random guessing. This further suggests that pruning can change the feature learning process, which leads to the performance drop of the pruned neural network. Up to our knowledge, this is the \textbf{first} generalization result for pruned neural networks, suggesting that pruning can improve the neural network's generalization.

Time-series anomaly detection is an important task and has been widely applied in the industry. Since manual data annotation is expensive and inefficient, most applications adopt unsupervised anomaly detection methods, but the results are usually sub-optimal and unsatisfactory to end customers. Weak supervision is a promising paradigm for obtaining considerable labels in a low-cost way, which enables the customers to label data by writing heuristic rules rather than annotating each instance individually. However, in the time-series domain, it is hard for people to write reasonable labeling functions as the time-series data is numerically continuous and difficult to be understood. In this paper, we propose a Label-Efficient Interactive Time-Series Anomaly Detection (LEIAD) system, which enables a user to improve the results of unsupervised anomaly detection by performing only a small amount of interactions with the system. To achieve this goal, the system integrates weak supervision and active learning collaboratively while generating labeling functions automatically using only a few labeled data. All of these techniques are complementary and can promote each other in a reinforced manner. We conduct experiments on three time-series anomaly detection datasets, demonstrating that the proposed system is superior to existing solutions in both weak supervision and active learning areas. Also, the system has been tested in a real scenario in industry to show its practicality.

As an important variant of entity alignment (EA), multi-modal entity alignment (MMEA) aims to discover identical entities across different knowledge graphs (KGs) with multiple modalities like images. However, current MMEA algorithms all adopt KG-level modality fusion strategies but ignore modality differences among individual entities, hurting the robustness to potential noise involved in modalities (e.g., unidentifiable images and relations). In this paper we present MEAformer, a multi-modal entity alignment transformer approach for meta modality hybrid, to dynamically predict the mutual correlation coefficients among modalities for instance-level feature fusion. A modal-aware hard entity replay strategy is also proposed for addressing vague entity details. Extensive experimental results show that our model not only achieves SOTA performance on multiple training scenarios including supervised, unsupervised, iterative, and low resource, but also has limited parameters, optimistic speed, and good interpretability. Our code will be available soon.

The task of video prediction and generation is known to be notoriously difficult, with the research in this area largely limited to short-term predictions. Though plagued with noise and stochasticity, videos consist of features that are organised in a spatiotemporal hierarchy, different features possessing different temporal dynamics. In this paper, we introduce Dynamic Latent Hierarchy (DLH) -- a deep hierarchical latent model that represents videos as a hierarchy of latent states that evolve over separate and fluid timescales. Each latent state is a mixture distribution with two components, representing the immediate past and the predicted future, causing the model to learn transitions only between sufficiently dissimilar states, while clustering temporally persistent states closer together. Using this unique property, DLH naturally discovers the spatiotemporal structure of a dataset and learns disentangled representations across its hierarchy. We hypothesise that this simplifies the task of modeling temporal dynamics of a video, improves the learning of long-term dependencies, and reduces error accumulation. As evidence, we demonstrate that DLH outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks in video prediction, is able to better represent stochasticity, as well as to dynamically adjust its hierarchical and temporal structure. Our paper shows, among other things, how progress in representation learning can translate into progress in prediction tasks.

Implicit regularization is an important way to interpret neural networks. Recent theory starts to explain implicit regularization with the model of deep matrix factorization (DMF) and analyze the trajectory of discrete gradient dynamics in the optimization process. These discrete gradient dynamics are relatively small but not infinitesimal, thus fitting well with the practical implementation of neural networks. Currently, discrete gradient dynamics analysis has been successfully applied to shallow networks but encounters the difficulty of complex computation for deep networks. In this work, we introduce another discrete gradient dynamics approach to explain implicit regularization, i.e. landscape analysis. It mainly focuses on gradient regions, such as saddle points and local minima. We theoretically establish the connection between saddle point escaping (SPE) stages and the matrix rank in DMF. We prove that, for a rank-R matrix reconstruction, DMF will converge to a second-order critical point after R stages of SPE. This conclusion is further experimentally verified on a low-rank matrix reconstruction problem. This work provides a new theory to analyze implicit regularization in deep learning.

Gradient-based explanation is the cornerstone of explainable deep networks, but it has been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. However, existing works measure the explanation robustness based on $\ell_p$-norm, which can be counter-intuitive to humans, who only pay attention to the top few salient features. We propose explanation ranking thickness as a more suitable explanation robustness metric. We then present a new practical adversarial attacking goal for manipulating explanation rankings. To mitigate the ranking-based attacks while maintaining computational feasibility, we derive surrogate bounds of the thickness that involve expensive sampling and integration. We use a multi-objective approach to analyze the convergence of a gradient-based attack to confirm that the explanation robustness can be measured by the thickness metric. We conduct experiments on various network architectures and diverse datasets to prove the superiority of the proposed methods, while the widely accepted Hessian-based curvature smoothing approaches are not as robust as our method.