Digital Commons Network^™

Prompt To Be Consistent Is Better Than Self-Consistent? Few-Shot And Zero-Shot Fact Verification With Pre-Trained Language Models, Fengzhu Zeng, Wei Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Few-shot or zero-shot fact verification only relies on a few or no labeled training examples. In this paper, we propose a novel method called ProToCo, to Prompt pre-trained language models (PLMs) To be Consistent, for improving the factuality assessment capability of PLMs in the few-shot and zero-shot settings. Given a claim-evidence pair, ProToCo generates multiple variants of the claim with different relations and frames a simple consistency mechanism as constraints for making compatible predictions across these variants. We update PLMs by using parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), leading to more accurate predictions in few-shot and zero-shot fact verification tasks. Our experiments on …

Multi-View Hypergraph Contrastive Policy Learning For Conversational Recommendation, Sen Zhao, Wei Wei, Xian-Ling Mao, Shuai: Yang Zhu, Zujie Wen, Dangyang Chen, Feida Zhu, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Conversational recommendation systems (CRS) aim to interactively acquire user preferences and accordingly recommend items to users. Accurately learning the dynamic user preferences is of crucial importance for CRS. Previous works learn the user preferences with pairwise relations from the interactive conversation and item knowledge, while largely ignoring the fact that factors for a relationship in CRS are multiplex. Specifically, the user likes/dislikes the items that satisfy some attributes (Like/Dislike view). Moreover social influence is another important factor that affects user preference towards the item (Social view), while is largely ignored by previous works in CRS. The user preferences from these …

Generative Ai And Chatgpt: Applications, Challenges, And Ai-Human Collaboration, Fiona Nah, Ruilin Zheng, Jingyuan Cai, Keng Siau, Langtao Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Artificial intelligence (AI) has elicited much attention across disciplines and industries (Hyder et al., Citation2019). AI has been defined as “a system’s ability to correctly interpret external data, to learn from such data, and to use those learnings to achieve specific goals and tasks through flexible adaptation” (Kaplan & Haenlein, Citation2019, p. 15). AI has gone through several development stages and AI winters. In the first two decades (i.e., 1950s and 1960s), AI demonstrated success which included programs such as General Problem Solver (Newell et al., Citation1959) and ELIZA (Weizenbaum, Citation1966). However, limitations in processing capacity and reduced spending on …

Augmenting Fake Content Detection In Online Platforms: A Domain Adaptive Transfer Learning Via Adversarial Training Approach, Ka Chung Ng, Ping Fan Ke, Mike K. P. So, Kar Yan Tam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online platforms are experimenting with interventions such as content screening to moderate the effects of fake, biased, and incensing content. Yet, online platforms face an operational challenge in implementing machine learning algorithms for managing online content due to the labeling problem, where labeled data used for model training are limited and costly to obtain. To address this issue, we propose a domain adaptive transfer learning via adversarial training approach to augment fake content detection with collective human intelligence. We first start with a source domain dataset containing deceptive and trustworthy general news constructed from a large collection of labeled news …

Duplicate Bug Report Detection: How Far Are We?, Ting Zhang, Donggyun Han, Venkatesh Vinayakarao, Ivana Clairine Irsan, Bowen Xu, Thung Ferdian, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many Duplicate Bug Report Detection (DBRD) techniques have been proposed in the research literature. The industry uses some other techniques. Unfortunately, there is insufficient comparison among them, and it is unclear how far we have been. This work fills this gap by comparing the aforementioned techniques. To compare them, we first need a benchmark that can estimate how a tool would perform if applied in a realistic setting today. Thus, we first investigated potential biases that affect the fair comparison of the accuracy of DBRD techniques. Our experiments suggest that data age and issue tracking system choice cause a significant …

Barriers And Self-Efficacy: A Large-Scale Study On The Impact Of Oss Courses On Student Perceptions, Larissa Salerno, Simone De França Tonhão, Igor Steinmacher, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Open source software (OSS) development offers a unique opportunity for students in Software Engineering to experience and participate in large-scale software development, however, the impact of such courses on students’ self-efficacy and the challenges faced by students are not well understood. This paper aims to address this gap by analyzing data from multiple instances of OSS development courses at universities in different countries and reporting on how students’ self-efficacy changed as a result of taking the course, as well as the barriers and challenges faced by students

A Comprehensive Study On Quality Assurance Tools For Java, Han Liu, Sen Chen, Ruitao Feng, Chengwei Liu, Kaixuan Li, Zhengzi Xu, Liming Nie, Yang Liu, Yixiang Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Quality assurance (QA) tools are receiving more and more attention and are widely used by developers. Given the wide range of solutions for QA technology, it is still a question of evaluating QA tools. Most existing research is limited in the following ways: (i) They compare tools without considering scanning rules analysis. (ii) They disagree on the effectiveness of tools due to the study methodology and benchmark dataset. (iii) They do not separately analyze the role of the warnings. (iv) There is no large-scale study on the analysis of time performance. To address these problems, in the paper, we systematically …

Knowledge-Enhanced Mixed-Initiative Dialogue System For Emotional Support Conversations, Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Yifei Yuan, Wai Lam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Unlike empathetic dialogues, the system in emotional support conversations (ESC) is expected to not only convey empathy for comforting the help-seeker, but also proactively assist in exploring and addressing their problems during the conversation. In this work, we study the problem of mixed-initiative ESC where the user and system can both take the initiative in leading the conversation. Specifically, we conduct a novel analysis on mixed-initiative ESC systems with a tailor-designed schema that divides utterances into different types with speaker roles and initiative types. Four emotional support metrics are proposed to evaluate the mixed-initiative interactions. The analysis reveals the necessity …

Towards Robust Personalized Dialogue Generation Via Order-Insensitive Representation Regularization, Liang Chen, Hongru Wang, Yang Deng, Wai-Chung Kwan, Zezhong Wang, Kam-Fai Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Generating persona consistent dialogue response is important for developing an intelligent conversational agent. Recent works typically fine-tune large-scale pre-trained models on this task by concatenating persona texts and dialogue history as a single input sequence to generate the target response. While simple and effective, our analysis shows that this popular practice is seriously affected by order sensitivity where different input orders of persona sentences significantly impact the quality and consistency of generated response, resulting in severe performance fluctuations (i.e., 29.4% on GPT2 and 83.2% on BART). To mitigate the order sensitivity problem, we propose a model-agnostic framework, ORder Insensitive Generation …

Product Question Answering In E-Commerce: A Survey, Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Qian Yu, Wai Lam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Product question answering (PQA), aiming to automatically provide instant responses to customer’s questions in E-Commerce platforms, has drawn increasing attention in recent years. Compared with typical QA problems, PQA exhibits unique challenges such as the subjectivity and reliability of user-generated contents in E-commerce platforms. Therefore, various problem settings and novel methods have been proposed to capture these special characteristics. In this paper, we aim to systematically review existing research efforts on PQA. Specifically, we categorize PQA studies into four problem settings in terms of the form of provided answers. We analyze the pros and cons, as well as present existing …

Goal Awareness For Conversational Ai: Proactivity, Non-Collaborativity, And Beyond, Yang Deng, Wenqiang Lei, Minlie Huang, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Conversational systems are envisioned to provide social support or functional service to human users via natural language interactions. Conventional conversation researches mainly focus on the responseability of the system, such as dialogue context understanding and response generation, but overlooks the design of an essential property in intelligent conversations, i.e., goal awareness. The awareness of goals means the state of not only being responsive to the users but also aware of the target conversational goal and capable of leading the conversation towards the goal, which is a significant step towards higher-level intelligence and artificial consciousness. It can not only largely improve …

Strategy‑Aware Bundle Recommender System, Yinwei Wei, Xiaohao Liu, Yunshan Ma, Xiang Wang, Liqiang Nie, Tat‑Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A bundle is a group of items that provides improved services to users and increased profits for sellers. However, locating the desired bundles that match the users' tastes still challenges us, due to the sparsity issue. Despite the remarkable performance of existing approaches, we argue that they seldom consider the bundling strategy (i.e., how the items within a bundle are associated with each other) in the bundle recommendation, resulting in the suboptimal user and bundle representations for their interaction prediction. Therefore, we propose to model the strategy-aware user and bundle representations for the bundle recommendation.Towards this end, we develop a …

Knowledge Compilation For Constrained Combinatorial Action Spaces In Reinforcement Learning, Jiajing Ling, Moritz Lukas Schuler, Akshat Kumar, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Action-constrained reinforcement learning (ACRL), where any action taken in a state must satisfy given constraints, has several practical applications such as resource allocation in supply-demand matching, and path planning among others. A key challenge is to enforce constraints when the action space is discrete and combinatorial. To address this, first, we assume an action is represented using propositional variables, and action constraints are represented using Boolean functions. Second, we compactly encode the set of all valid actions that satisfy action constraints using a probabilistic sentential decision diagram (PSDD), a recently proposed knowledge compilation framework. Parameters of the PSDD compactly encode …

Enhancing Third-Party Software Reliability Through Bug Bounty Programs, Tianlu Zhou, Dan Ma, Nan Feng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bug Bounty Programs (BBPs) reward external hackers for identifying and reporting software vulnerabilities. As the number of security issues caused by third-party applications has been significantly increased recently, many digital platforms are considering launching BBPs to help enhance the reliability of third-party software. BBPs bring benefits to the platform and vendors, meanwhile impose additional costs on them as well. As a result, the overall impact of using BBP is unclear. In this paper, we present an analytical model to examine the strategic decisions of launching and participating in a BBP for the platform and the third-party vendor, respectively. We find …

Ifundit: Visual Profiling Of Fund Investment Styles, Rong Zhang, Bon Kyung Ku, Yong Wang, Xuanwu Yue, Siyuan Liu, Ke Li, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mutual funds are becoming increasingly popular with the emergence of Internet finance. Clear profiling of a fund's investment style is crucial for fund managers to evaluate their investment strategies, and for investors to understand their investment. However, it is challenging to profile a fund's investment style as it requires a comprehensive analysis of complex multi-dimensional temporal data. In addition, different fund managers and investors have different focuses when analysing a fund's investment style. To address the issue, we propose iFUNDit, an interactive visual analytic system for fund investment style analysis. The system decomposes a fund's critical features into performance attributes …

Imitating Opponent To Win: Adversarial Policy Imitation Learning In Two-Player Competitive Games, The Viet Bui, Tien Mai, Thanh H. Nguyen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent research on vulnerabilities of deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown that adversarial policies adopted by an adversary agent can influence a target RL agent (victim agent) to perform poorly in a multi-agent environment. In existing studies, adversarial policies are directly trained based on experiences of interacting with the victim agent. There is a key shortcoming of this approach --- knowledge derived from historical interactions may not be properly generalized to unexplored policy regions of the victim agent, making the trained adversarial policy significantly less effective. In this work, we design a new effective adversarial policy learning algorithm that overcomes …

Avoiding Starvation Of Arms In Restless Multi-Armed Bandit, Dexun Li, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Restless multi-armed bandits (RMAB) is a popular framework for optimizing performance with limited resources under uncertainty. It is an extremely useful model for monitoring beneficiaries (arms) and executing timely interventions using health workers (limited resources) to ensure optimal benefit in public health settings. For instance, RMAB has been used to track patients' health and monitor their adherence in tuberculosis settings, ensure pregnant mothers listen to automated calls about good pregnancy practices, etc. Due to the limited resources, typically certain individuals, communities, or regions are starved of interventions, which can potentially have a significant negative impact on the individual/community in the …

Where Is My Spot? Few-Shot Image Generation Via Latent Subspace Optimization, Chenxi Zheng, Bangzhen Liu, Huaidong Zhang, Xuemiao Xu, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Image generation relies on massive training data that can hardly produce diverse images of an unseen category according to a few examples. In this paper, we address this dilemma by projecting sparse few-shot samples into a continuous latent space that can potentially generate infinite unseen samples. The rationale behind is that we aim to locate a centroid latent position in a conditional StyleGAN, where the corresponding output image on that centroid can maximize the similarity with the given samples. Although the given samples are unseen for the conditional StyleGAN, we assume the neighboring latent subspace around the centroid belongs to …

Invalidator: Automated Patch Correctness Assessment Via Semantic And Syntactic Reasoning, Tranh Le-Cong, Duc Minh Luong, Xuan Bach D. Le, David Lo, Nhat-Hoa Tran, Bui Quang-Huy, Quyet-Thang Huynh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automated program repair (APR) has been gaining ground recently. However, a significant challenge that still remains is test overfitting, in which APR-generated patches plausibly pass the validation test suite but fail to generalize. A common practice to assess the correctness of APR-generated patches is to judge whether they are equivalent to ground truth, i.e., developer-written patches, by either generating additional test cases or employing human manual inspections. The former often requires the generation of at least one test that shows behavioral differences between the APR-patched and developer-patched programs. Searching for this test, however, can be difficult as the search space …

Privacy-Preserving Ranked Spatial Keyword Query In Mobile Cloud-Assisted Fog Computing, Qiuyun Tong, Yinbin Li Miao, Ximeng Liu, Robert H. Deng, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the increasing popularity of GPS-equipped mobile devices in cloud-assisted fog computing scenarios, massive spatio-textual data is generated and outsourced to cloud servers for storage and analysis. Existing privacy-preserving range query or ranked keyword search schemes does not support a unified index, and are just applicable for the symmetric environment where all users sharing the same secret key. To solve this issue, we propose a Privacy-preserving Ranked Spatial keyword Query in mobile cloud-assisted Fog computing (PRSQ-F). Specifically, we design a novel comparable product encoding strategy that combines both spatial and textual conditions tightly to retrieve the objects in query range …

Extracting Class Activation Maps From Non-Discriminative Features As Well, Zhaozheng Chen, Qianru Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Extracting class activation maps (CAM) from a classification model often results in poor coverage on foreground objects, i.e., only the discriminative region (e.g., the “head” of “sheep”) is recognized and the rest (e.g., the “leg” of “sheep”) mistakenly as background. The crux behind is that the weight of the classifier (used to compute CAM) captures only the discriminative features of objects. We tackle this by introducing a new computation method for CAM that explicitly captures non-discriminative features as well, thereby expanding CAM to cover whole objects. Specifically, we omit the last pooling layer of the classification model, and perform clustering …

Preference-Aware Delivery Planning For Last-Mile Logistics, Qian Shao, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Optimizing delivery routes for last-mile logistics service is challenging and has attracted the attention of many researchers. These problems are usually modeled and solved as variants of vehicle routing problems (VRPs) with challenging real-world constraints (e.g., time windows, precedence). However, despite many decades of solid research on solving these VRP instances, we still see significant gaps between optimized routes and the routes that are actually preferred by the practitioners. Most of these gaps are due to the difference between what's being optimized, and what the practitioners actually care about, which is hard to be defined exactly in many instances. In …

A Mixed-Integer Linear Programming Reduction Of Disjoint Bilinear Programs Via Symbolic Variable Elimination, Jihwan Jeong, Scott Sanner, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A disjointly constrained bilinear program (DBLP) has various practical and industrial applications, e.g., in game theory, facility location, supply chain management, and multi-agent planning problems. Although earlier work has noted the equivalence of DBLP and mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) from an abstract theoretical perspective, a practical and exact closed-form reduction of a DBLP to a MILP has remained elusive. Such explicit reduction would allow us to leverage modern MILP solvers and techniques along with their solution optimality and anytime approximation guarantees. To this end, we provide the first constructive closed-form MILP reduction of a DBLP by extending the technique of …

How To Resuscitate A Sick Vm In The Cloud, Xuhua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A guest virtual machine in a cloud platform may fall “sick” when its kernel encounters a fatal low-level bug or is subverted by an adversary. The VM owner is hence likely to lose her control over it due to a kernel hang or being denied of remote accesses. While the VM can be rebooted with the assistance from the cloud server, the owner not only faces service disruption but also is left with no opportunity to make an in-depth diagnosis and forensics on the spot, not to mention a live rectification. Currently, the cloud service provider has neither incentive nor …

Semantic Scene Completion With Cleaner Self, Fengyun Wang, Dong Zhang, Hanwang Zhang, Jinhui Tang, Qianru Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Semantic Scene Completion (SSC) transforms an image of single-view depth and/or RGB 2D pixels into 3D voxels, each of whose semantic labels are predicted. SSC is a well-known ill-posed problem as the prediction model has to “imagine” what is behind the visible surface, which is usually represented by Truncated Signed Distance Function (TSDF). Due to the sensory imperfection of the depth camera, most existing methods based on the noisy TSDF estimated from depth values suffer from 1) incomplete volumetric predictions and 2) confused semantic labels. To this end, we use the ground-truth 3D voxels to generate a perfect visible surface, …

Unbiased Multiple Instance Learning For Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection, Hui Lyu, Zhongqi Yue, Qianru Sun, Bin Luo, Zhen Cui, Hanwang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection (WSVAD) is challenging because the binary anomaly label is only given on the video level, but the output requires snippet-level predictions. So, Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is prevailing in WSVAD. However, MIL is notoriously known to suffer from many false alarms because the snippet-level detector is easily biased towards the abnormal snippets with simple context, confused by the normality with the same bias, and missing the anomaly with a different pattern. To this end, we propose a new MIL framework: Unbiased MIL (UMIL), to learn unbiased anomaly features that improve WSVAD. At each MIL training …

The Bemi Stardust: A Structured Ensemble Of Binarized Neural Networks, Ambrogio Maria Bernardelli, Stefano Gualandi, Hoong Chuin Lau, Simone Milanesi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs) are receiving increasing attention due to their lightweight architecture and ability to run on low-power devices, given the fact that they can be implemented using Boolean operations. The state-of-the-art for training classification BNNs restricted to few-shot learning is based on a Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) approach. This paper proposes the BeMi ensemble, a structured architecture of classification-designed BNNs based on training a single BNN for each possible pair of classes and applying a majority voting scheme to predict the final output. The training of a single BNN discriminating between two classes is achieved by a MIP …

Towards A Smaller Student: Capacity Dynamic Distillation For Efficient Image Retrieval, Yi Xie, Huaidong Zhang, Xuemiao Xu, Jianqing Zhu, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Previous Knowledge Distillation based efficient image retrieval methods employ a lightweight network as the student model for fast inference. However, the lightweight student model lacks adequate representation capacity for effective knowledge imitation during the most critical early training period, causing final performance degeneration. To tackle this issue, we propose a Capacity Dynamic Distillation framework, which constructs a student model with editable representation capacity. Specifically, the employed student model is initially a heavy model to fruitfully learn distilled knowledge in the early training epochs, and the student model is gradually compressed during the training. To dynamically adjust the model capacity, our …

Tracing The Twenty-Year Evolution Of Developing Ai For Eye Screening In Singapore: A Master Chronology Of Sidrp, Selena+ And Eyris, Steven M. Miller

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This working paper is entirely comprised of a timeline table that begins in 2002 and runs through mid-2023. Across these two decades, this timeline traces the evolutionary development of the following:

• The early Singapore R&D efforts to apply software-based image analysis algorithms and methods to analyse eye retina images for diabetic retinopathy and other eye diseases. This was based on a collaboration between the Singapore Eye Research Institute (SERI) and its parent organization, the Singapore National Eye Centre (SNEC), with faculty from the School of Computing at National University of Singapore.
• The establishment and operation of the Singapore Integrated Diabetic …

How Does Credit Risk Affect Cost Management Strategies? Evidence On The Initiation Of Credit Default Swap And Sticky Cost Behavior, Jing Dai, Nan Hu, Rong Huang, Yan Yan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we examine the effect of credit defaults swaps (CDS) initiation on reference firms' cost management strategies. CDS contracts provide insurance protection for creditors, inducing a shift in bargaining power from borrowers to creditors and an excessive incidence of bankruptcy. Anticipating more intransigent creditors in debt renegotiations and higher bankruptcy risk, CDS firms are incentivized to mitigate risk through decreasing cost stickiness after CDS initiation, as cost stickiness lowers liquidity and triggers early covenant violations. We find that, on average, CDS initiation is associated with a decline in reference firms' cost stickiness. This association is more pronounced for …