SANTM: Efficient Self-attention-driven Network for Text Matching

Self-attention mechanisms have recently been embraced for a broad range of text-matching applications. Self-attention model takes only one sentence as an input with no extra information, i.e., one can utilize the final hidden state or pooling. However, text-matching problems can be interpreted either in symmetrical or asymmetrical scopes. For instance, paraphrase detection is an asymmetrical task, while textual entailment classification and question-answer matching are considered asymmetrical tasks. In this article, we leverage attractive properties of self-attention mechanism and proposes an attention-based network that incorporates three key components for inter-sequence attention: global pointwise features, preceding attentive features, and contextual features while updating the rest of the components. Our model follows evaluation on two benchmark datasets cover tasks of textual entailment and question-answer matching. The proposed efficient Self-attention-driven Network for Text Matching outperforms the state of the art on the Stanford Natural Language Inference and WikiQA datasets with much fewer parameters.

Dual Gated Graph Attention Networks with Dynamic Iterative Training for Cross-Lingual Entity Alignment

Cross-lingual entity alignment has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Past studies using conventional approaches to match entities share the common problem of missing important structural information beyond entities in the modeling process. This allows graph neural network models to step in. Most existing graph neural network approaches model individual knowledge graphs (KGs) separately with a small amount of pre-aligned entities served as anchors to connect different KG embedding spaces. However, this characteristic can cause several major problems, including performance restraint due to the insufficiency of available seed alignments and ignorance of pre-aligned links that are useful in contextual information in-between nodes. In this article, we propose DuGa-DIT, a dual gated graph attention network with dynamic iterative training, to address these problems in a unified model. The DuGa-DIT model captures neighborhood and cross-KG alignment features by using intra-KG attention and cross-KG attention layers. With the dynamic iterative process, we can dynamically update the cross-KG attention score matrices, which enables our model to capture more cross-KG information. We conduct extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets and a case study in cross-lingual personalized search. Our experimental results demonstrate that DuGa-DIT outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Adversarial Separation Network for Text Style Transfer

This article considers the task of text style transfer: transforming a specific style of sentence into another while preserving its style-independent content. A dominate approach to text style transfer is to learn a good content factor of text, define a fixed vector for every style and recombine them to generate text in the required style. In fact, there are a large number of different words to convey the same style from different aspects. Thus, using a fixed vector to represent one style is very inefficient, which causes the weak representation power of the style vector and limits text diversity of the same style. To address this problem, we propose a novel neural generative model called Adversarial Separation Network (ASN), which can learn the content and style vector jointly and the learnt vectors have strong representation power and good interpretabilities. In our method, adversarial learning is implemented to enhance our model’s capability of disentangling the two factors. To evaluate our method, we conduct experiments on two benchmark datasets. Experimental results show our method can perform style transfer better than strong comparison systems. We also demonstrate the strong interpretability of the learnt latent vectors.

Multi-Graph Heterogeneous Interaction Fusion for Social Recommendation

With the rapid development of online social recommendation system, substantial methods have been proposed. Unlike traditional recommendation system, social recommendation performs by integrating social relationship features, where there are two major challenges, i.e., early summarization and data sparsity. Thus far, they have not been solved effectively. In this article, we propose a novel social recommendation approach, namely Multi-Graph Heterogeneous Interaction Fusion (MG-HIF), to solve these two problems. Our basic idea is to fuse heterogeneous interaction features from multi-graphs, i.e., user–item bipartite graph and social relation network, to improve the vertex representation learning. A meta-path cross-fusion model is proposed to fuse multi-hop heterogeneous interaction features via discrete cross-correlations. Based on that, a social relation GAN is developed to explore latent friendships of each user. We further fuse representations from two graphs by a novel multi-graph information fusion strategy with attention mechanism. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to combine meta-path with social relation representation. To evaluate the performance of MG-HIF, we compare MG-HIF with seven states of the art over four benchmark datasets. The experimental results show that MG-HIF achieves better performance.

Gender recognition from unconstrained selfie images: a convolutional neural network approach

<p>Human gender recognition is an essential demographic tool. This is reflected in forensic science, surveillance systems and targeted marketing applications. This research was always driven using standard face images and hand-crafted features. Such way has achieved good results, however, the reliability of the facial images had a great effect on the robustness of extracted features, where any small change in the query facial image could change the results. Nevertheless, the performance of current techniques in unconstrained environments is still inefficient, especially when contrasted against recent breakthroughs in different computer vision research. This paper introduces a novel technique for human gender recognition from non-standard selfie images using deep learning approaches. Selfie photos are uncontrolled partial or full-frontal body images that are usually taken by people themselves in real-life environment. As far as we know this is the first paper of its kind to identify gender from selfie photos, using deep learning approach. The experimental results on the selfie dataset emphasizes the proposed technique effectiveness in recognizing gender from such images with 89% accuracy. The performance is further consolidated by testing on numerous benchmark datasets that are widely used in the field, namely: Adience, LFW, FERET, NIVE, Caltech WebFaces and<br />CAS-PEAL-R1.</p>

Personalized, Sequential, Attentive, Metric-Aware Product Search

The task of personalized product search aims at retrieving a ranked list of products given a user’s input query and his/her purchase history. To address this task, we propose the PSAM model, a Personalized, Sequential, Attentive and Metric-aware (PSAM) model, that learns the semantic representations of three different categories of entities, i.e., users, queries, and products, based on user sequential purchase historical data and the corresponding sequential queries. Specifically, a query-based attentive LSTM (QA-LSTM) model and an attention mechanism are designed to infer users dynamic embeddings, which is able to capture their short-term and long-term preferences. To obtain more fine-grained embeddings of the three categories of entities, a metric-aware objective is deployed in our model to force the inferred embeddings subject to the triangle inequality, which is a more realistic distance measurement for product search. Experiments conducted on four benchmark datasets show that our PSAM model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art product search baselines in terms of effectiveness by up to 50.9% improvement under NDCG@20. Our visualization experiments further illustrate that the learned product embeddings are able to distinguish different types of products.

Graph Co-Attentive Session-based Recommendation

Session-based recommendation aims to generate recommendations merely based on the ongoing session, which is a challenging task. Previous methods mainly focus on modeling the sequential signals or the transition relations between items in the current session using RNNs or GNNs to identify user’s intent for recommendation. Such models generally ignore the dynamic connections between the local and global item transition patterns, although the global information is taken into consideration by exploiting the global-level pair-wise item transitions. Moreover, existing methods that mainly adopt the cross-entropy loss with softmax generally face a serious over-fitting problem, harming the recommendation accuracy. Thus, in this article, we propose a Graph Co-Attentive Recommendation Machine (GCARM) for session-based recommendation. In detail, we first design a Graph Co-Attention Network (GCAT) to consider the dynamic correlations between the local and global neighbors of each node during the information propagation. Then, the item-level dynamic connections between the output of the local and global graphs are modeled to generate the final item representations. After that, we produce the prediction scores and design a Max Cross-Entropy (MCE) loss to prevent over-fitting. Extensive experiments are conducted on three benchmark datasets, i.e., Diginetica, Gowalla, and Yoochoose. The experimental results show that GCARM can achieve the state-of-the-art performance in terms of Recall and MRR, especially on boosting the ranking of the target item.

A Comprehensive Taxonomy of Dynamic Texture Representation

Representing dynamic textures (DTs) plays an important role in many real implementations in the computer vision community. Due to the turbulent and non-directional motions of DTs along with the negative impacts of different factors (e.g., environmental changes, noise, illumination, etc.), efficiently analyzing DTs has raised considerable challenges for the state-of-the-art approaches. For 20 years, many different techniques have been introduced to handle the above well-known issues for enhancing the performance. Those methods have shown valuable contributions, but the problems have been incompletely dealt with, particularly recognizing DTs on large-scale datasets. In this article, we present a comprehensive taxonomy of DT representation in order to purposefully give a thorough overview of the existing methods along with overall evaluations of their obtained performances. Accordingly, we arrange the methods into six canonical categories. Each of them is then taken in a brief presentation of its principal methodology stream and various related variants. The effectiveness levels of the state-of-the-art methods are then investigated and thoroughly discussed with respect to quantitative and qualitative evaluations in classifying DTs on benchmark datasets. Finally, we point out several potential applications and the remaining challenges that should be addressed in further directions. In comparison with two existing shallow DT surveys (i.e., the first one is out of date as it was made in 2005, while the newer one (published in 2016) is an inadequate overview), we believe that our proposed comprehensive taxonomy not only provides a better view of DT representation for the target readers but also stimulates future research activities.

Exploiting Positional Information for Session-Based Recommendation

For present e-commerce platforms, it is important to accurately predict users’ preference for a timely next-item recommendation. To achieve this goal, session-based recommender systems are developed, which are based on a sequence of the most recent user-item interactions to avoid the influence raised from outdated historical records. Although a session can usually reflect a user’s current preference, a local shift of the user’s intention within the session may still exist. Specifically, the interactions that take place in the early positions within a session generally indicate the user’s initial intention, while later interactions are more likely to represent the latest intention. Such positional information has been rarely considered in existing methods, which restricts their ability to capture the significance of interactions at different positions. To thoroughly exploit the positional information within a session, a theoretical framework is developed in this paper to provide an in-depth analysis of the positional information. We formally define the properties of forward-awareness and backward-awareness to evaluate the ability of positional encoding schemes in capturing the initial and the latest intention. According to our analysis, existing positional encoding schemes are generally forward-aware only, which can hardly represent the dynamics of the intention in a session. To enhance the positional encoding scheme for the session-based recommendation, a dual positional encoding (DPE) is proposed to account for both forward-awareness and backward-awareness . Based on DPE, we propose a novel Positional Recommender (PosRec) model with a well-designed Position-aware Gated Graph Neural Network module to fully exploit the positional information for session-based recommendation tasks. Extensive experiments are conducted on two e-commerce benchmark datasets, Yoochoose and Diginetica and the experimental results show the superiority of the PosRec by comparing it with the state-of-the-art session-based recommender models.

Direction-Aware User Recommendation Based on Asymmetric Network Embedding

User recommendation aims at recommending users with potential interests in the social network. Previous works have mainly focused on the undirected social networks with symmetric relationship such as friendship, whereas recent advances have been made on the asymmetric relationship such as the following and followed by relationship. Among the few existing direction-aware user recommendation methods, the random walk strategy has been widely adopted to extract the asymmetric proximity between users. However, according to our analysis on real-world directed social networks, we argue that the asymmetric proximity captured by existing random walk based methods are insufficient due to the inbalance in-degree and out-degree of nodes. To tackle this challenge, we propose InfoWalk, a novel informative walk strategy to efficiently capture the asymmetric proximity solely based on random walks. By transferring the direction information into the weights of each step, InfoWalk is able to overcome the limitation of edges while simultaneously maintain both the direction and proximity. Based on the asymmetric proximity captured by InfoWalk, we further propose the qualitative (DNE-L) and quantitative (DNE-T) directed network embedding methods, capable of preserving the two properties in the embedding space. Extensive experiments conducted on six real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed DNE model over several state-of-the-art approaches in various tasks.