Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

End-To-End Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning With Integrated Subgoal Discovery, Shubham Pateria, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan, Chai Quek

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) is a promising approach to perform long-horizon goal-reaching tasks by decomposing the goals into subgoals. In a holistic HRL paradigm, an agent must autonomously discover such subgoals and also learn a hierarchy of policies that uses them to reach the goals. Recently introduced end-to-end HRL methods accomplish this by using the higher-level policy in the hierarchy to directly search the useful subgoals in a continuous subgoal space. However, learning such a policy may be challenging when the subgoal space is large. We propose integrated discovery of salient subgoals (LIDOSS), an end-to-end HRL method with an integrated …

Coresets For Vertical Federated Learning: Regularized Linear Regression And K-Means Clustering, Lingxiao Huang, Zhize Li, Jialin Sun, Haoyu Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Vertical federated learning (VFL), where data features are stored in multiple parties distributively, is an important area in machine learning. However, the communication complexity for VFL is typically very high. In this paper, we propose a unified framework by constructing coresets in a distributed fashion for communication-efficient VFL. We study two important learning tasks in the VFL setting: regularized linear regression and $k$-means clustering, and apply our coreset framework to both problems. We theoretically show that using coresets can drastically alleviate the communication complexity, while nearly maintain the solution quality. Numerical experiments are conducted to corroborate our theoretical findings.

Beer: Fast O(1/T) Rate For Decentralized Nonconvex Optimization With Communication Compression, Haoyu Zhao, Boyue Li, Zhize Li, Peter Richtarik, Yuejie Chi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Communication efficiency has been widely recognized as the bottleneck for large-scale decentralized machine learning applications in multi-agent or federated environments. To tackle the communication bottleneck, there have been many efforts to design communication-compressed algorithms for decentralized nonconvex optimization, where the clients are only allowed to communicate a small amount of quantized information (aka bits) with their neighbors over a predefined graph topology. Despite significant efforts, the state-of-the-art algorithm in the nonconvex setting still suffers from a slower rate of convergence $O((G/T)^{2/3})$ compared with their uncompressed counterpart, where $G$ measures the data heterogeneity across different clients, and $T$ is the number …

Soteriafl: A Unified Framework For Private Federated Learning With Communication Compression, Zhize Li, Haoyu Zhao, Boyue Li, Yuejie Chi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To enable large-scale machine learning in bandwidth-hungry environments such as wireless networks, significant progress has been made recently in designing communication-efficient federated learning algorithms with the aid of communication compression. On the other end, privacy-preserving, especially at the client level, is another important desideratum that has not been addressed simultaneously in the presence of advanced communication compression techniques yet. In this paper, we propose a unified framework that enhances the communication efficiency of private federated learning with communication compression. Exploiting both general compression operators and local differential privacy, we first examine a simple algorithm that applies compression directly to differentially-private …

Conreader: Exploring Implicit Relations In Contracts For Contract Clause Extraction, Weiwen Xu, Yang Deng, Wenqiang Lei, Wenlong Zhao, Tat-Seng Chua, Wai Lam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study automatic Contract Clause Extraction (CCE) by modeling implicit relations in legal contracts. Existing CCE methods mostly treat contracts as plain text, creating a substantial barrier to understanding contracts of high complexity. In this work, we first comprehensively analyze the complexity issues of contracts and distill out three implicit relations commonly found in contracts, namely, 1) Long-range Context Relation that captures the correlations of distant clauses; 2) Term-Definition Relation that captures the relation between important terms with their corresponding definitions; and 3) Similar Clause Relation that captures the similarities between clauses of the same type. Then we propose a …

Enhancing Literacy Education With Narrative Richness In The Metaverse, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Daniel Jiandong Shen, Umawathy Techanamurthy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Through an education-centric metaverse learning application, this research aims to assess the use of narrative richness to deliver media, language, and sustainability literacy education. The 21st-century learning needs require teaching and learning resources to be shared and managed more effectively across institutions. The use of metaverse features can help to manage varying narrative richness to boost learning reflection and attitude. Despite its potential, it is unclear how narrative richness in the metaverse can enhance teaching and learning. The study proposed in this research, which includes institutions from four Asian countries, is driven by this knowledge and evidence gap. Module leaders …

Rural America Is Still Technologically Behind: Why It Matters Now More Than Ever, Paul Force-Emery Mackie

Social Work Department Publications

No abstract provided.

Farmer Adoption Of Advanced Technology In Agribusiness, Justin W. Belcher

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Normally, family-owned farms are slow to adopt advanced technologies though these technologies can provide several benefits to the farm and have the potential to increase farm production volumes to help meet future population growth. The goal of this study was to document the factors that influence the adoption decision of advanced technologies by family-owned farms and what strategies can be used to motivate adoption. Case study research was conducted to gather data in a more structured way from family-owned farms typically excluded from past research for the purpose of comparing similarities across similar and dissimilar farms. For generalizing similarities, a …

Designing A Messaging Strategy To Improve Information Security Policy Compliance, Federico Giovannetti

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Lack of employee compliance with information security policies is a key factor driving security incidents. Information security practitioners struggle to enforce policy compliance while employees try to curtail safeguards in favor of expediency and other perceived business goals. Several studies have shown individual and organizational factors influencing this type of employee behavior. However, few have recommended management-level interventions that can be used as a solution framework by information security practitioners.

This research utilized the Design Science Research (DSR) methodology to develop a management-level intervention based on a messaging strategy that aims to help information security practitioners improve the information security …

Redefining Research In Nanotechnology Simulations: A New Approach To Data Caching And Analysis, Darin Tsai, Alan Zhang, Aloysius Rebeiro

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

No abstract provided.

Mining Product Textual Data For Recommendation Explanations, Le Trung Hoang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Recommendation explanations help to make sense of recommendations, increasing the likelihood of adoption. Here, we are interested in mining product textual data, an unstructured data type, coming from manufacturers, sellers, or consumers, appearing in many places including title, summary, description, review, question and answers, etc., can be a rich source of information to explain the recommendation. As the explanation task could be decoupled from that of recommendation objective, we can categorize recommendation explanation into integrated approach, that uses a single interpretable model to produce both recommendation and explanation, or pipeline approach, that uses a post-hoc explanation model to produce explanation …

Meta-Complementing The Semantics Of Short Texts In Neural Topic Models, Ce Zhang, Hady Wirawan Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Topic models infer latent topic distributions based on observed word co-occurrences in a text corpus. While typically a corpus contains documents of variable lengths, most previous topic models treat documents of different lengths uniformly, assuming that each document is sufficiently informative. However, shorter documents may have only a few word co-occurrences, resulting in inferior topic quality. Some other previous works assume that all documents are short, and leverage external auxiliary data, e.g., pretrained word embeddings and document connectivity. Orthogonal to existing works, we remedy this problem within the corpus itself by proposing a Meta-Complement Topic Model, which improves topic quality …

Vlstereoset: A Study Of Stereotypical Bias In Pre-Trained Vision-Language Models, Kankan Zhou, Yibin Lai, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper we study how to measure stereotypical bias in pre-trained vision-language models. We leverage a recently released text-only dataset, StereoSet, which covers a wide range of stereotypical bias, and extend it into a vision-language probing dataset called VLStereoSet to measure stereotypical bias in vision-language models. We analyze the differences between text and image and propose a probing task that detects bias by evaluating a model’s tendency to pick stereotypical statements as captions for anti-stereotypical images. We further define several metrics to measure both a vision-language model’s overall stereotypical bias and its intra-modal and inter-modal bias. Experiments on six …

M-Edese: Multi-Domain, Easily Deployable, And Efficiently Searchable Encryption, Jiaming Yuan, Yingjiu Li, Jianting Ning, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Searchable encryption is an essential component of cryptography, which allows users to search for keywords and retrieve records from an encrypted database at cloud storage while ensuring the confidentiality of users’ queries. While most existing research on searchable encryption focuses on the single domain setting, we propose the first Multi-Domain, Easily-Deployable, Efficiently-Searchable Encryption (M-EDESE) system that allows users to query keywords cross domains with high efficiency and preserved privacy without additional cooperation from the cloud storage. In the multi-domain setting, a user who belongs to a domain can query keywords from another domain under an inter-domain partnership. Any party can …

What Motivates Software Practitioners To Contribute To Inner Source?, Zhiyuan Wan, Xin Xia, Yun Zhang, David Lo, Daibing Zhou, Qiuyuan Chen, Ahmed E. Hassan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software development organizations have adopted open source development practices to support or augment their software development processes, a phenomenon referred to as inner source. Given the rapid adoption of inner source, we wonder what motivates software practitioners to contribute to inner source projects. We followed a mixed-methods approach--a qualitative phase of interviews with 20 interviewees, followed by a quantitative phase of an exploratory survey with 124 respondents from 13 countries across four continents. Our study uncovers practitioners' motivation to contribute to inner source projects, as well as how the motivation differs from what motivates practitioners to participate in open source …

Graph Neural Network With Self-Attention And Multi-Task Learning For Credit Default Risk Prediction, Zihao Li, Xianzhi Wang, Lina Yao, Yakun Chen, Guandong Xu, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a graph neural network with self-attention and multi-task learning (SaM-GNN) to leverage the advantages of deep learning for credit default risk prediction. Our approach incorporates two parallel tasks based on shared intermediate vectors for input vector reconstruction and credit default risk prediction, respectively. To better leverage supervised data, we use self-attention layers for feature representation of categorical and numeric data; we further link raw data into a graph and use a graph convolution module to aggregate similar information and cope with missing values during constructing intermediate vectors. Our method does not heavily rely on feature engineering work and …

Delving Deep Into Pixelized Face Recovery And Defense, Zhixuan Zhong, Yong Du, Yang Zhou, Jiangzhong Cao, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Pixelization is arguably one of the most well-adopted deterministic obfuscation techniques for privacy preservation purposes. Although the recovery of pixelized faces is underexplored, the powerful deep neural networks might combat this problem in a data-driven manner. As a consequence, an unbreakable pixelization approach is desired. To achieve this goal, in this paper, we delve into two contradictory problems of unrecoverable pixelization and its counterpart, depixelization, by leveraging the best recovery to strengthen the robustness of the unrecoverable pixelized patterns. In particular, on the offensive end of recovery, we combat the large and continuous nature of pixelized regions by proposing two …

Photovoltaic Cells For Energy Harvesting And Indoor Positioning, Hamada Rizk, Dong Ma, Mahbub Hassan, Moustafa Youssef

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose SoLoc, a lightweight probabilistic fingerprinting-based technique for energy-free device-free indoor localization. The system harnesses photovoltaic currents harvested by the photovoltaic cells in smart environments for simultaneously powering digital devices and user positioning. The basic principle is that the location of the human interferes with the lighting received by the photovoltaic cells, thus producing a location fingerprint on the generated photocurrents. To ensure resilience to noisy measurements, SoLoc constructs probability distributions as a photovoltaic fingerprint at each location. Then, we employ a probabilistic graphical model for estimating the user location in the continuous space. Results show that SoLoc can …

Investigating Bloom's Cognitive Skills In Foundation And Advanced Programming Courses From Students' Discussions, Joel Jer Wei Lim, Gottipati Swapna, Kyong Jin Shim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Programming courses provide students with the skills to develop complex business applications. Teaching and learning programming is challenging, and collaborative learning is proposed to help with this challenge. Online discussion forums promote networking with other learners such that they can build knowledge collaboratively. It aids students open their horizons of thought processes to acquire cognitive skills. Cognitive analysis of discussion is critical to understand students' learning process. In this paper, we propose Bloom's taxonomy based cognitive model for programming discussion forums. We present machine learning (ML) based solution to extract students' cognitive skills. Our evaluations on compupting courses show that …

Codematcher: A Tool For Large-Scale Code Search Based On Query Semantics Matching, Chao Liu, Xuanlin Bao, Xin Xia, Meng Yan, David Lo, Ting Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to the emergence of large-scale codebases, such as GitHub and Gitee, searching and reusing existing code can help developers substantially improve software development productivity. Over the years, many code search tools have been developed. Early tools leveraged the information retrieval (IR) technique to perform an efficient code search for a frequently changed large-scale codebase. However, the search accuracy was low due to the semantic mismatch between query and code. In the recent years, many tools leveraged Deep Learning (DL) technique to address this issue. But the DL-based tools are slow and the search accuracy is unstable.In this paper, we …

Artificial Intelligence For Natural Disaster Management, Guansong Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Artificial intelligence (AI) can leverage massive amount of diverse types of data, such as geospatial data, social media data, and wireless network sensor data, to enhance our understanding of natural disasters, their forecasting and detection, and humanitarian assistance in natural disaster management (NDM). Due to this potential, different communities have been dedicating enormous efforts to the development and/or adoption of AI technologies for NDM. This article provides an overview of these efforts and discusses major challenges and opportunities in this topic.

A Fine-Grained Data Set And Analysis Of Tangling In Bug Fixing Commits, Steffen Herbold, Alexander Trautsch, Benjamin Ledel, Alireza Aghamohammadi, Taher Ahmed Ghaleb, Kuljit Kaur Chahal, Tim Bossenmaier, Bhaveet Nagaria, Philip Makedonski, Matin Nili Ahmadabadi, Kristóf Szabados, Helge Spieker, Matej Madeja, Nathaniel G. Hoy, Christoph Treude, Shangwen Wang, Gema Rodríguez-Pérez, Ricardo Colomo-Palacios, Roberto Verdecchia, Paramvir Singh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context: Tangled commits are changes to software that address multiple concerns at once. For researchers interested in bugs, tangled commits mean that they actually study not only bugs, but also other concerns irrelevant for the study of bugs.Objective: We want to improve our understanding of the prevalence of tangling and the types of changes that are tangled within bug fixing commits.Methods: We use a crowd sourcing approach for manual labeling to validate which changes contribute to bug fixes for each line in bug fixing commits. Each line is labeled by four participants. If at least three participants agree on the …

The Necessity Of Cloud-Based Simulator For Indonesia's Maritime Education And Training Institutions, Stevian Geerbel Adrianes Rakka

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Text Mining Policy Documents To Support Transboundary Integrated Ecosystem Assessment : The Case Of The South Mid-Atlantic Ridge, Debora Cristina Ferrari Ramalho

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Data Sharing Through Open Access Data Repositories, Karin Bennedsen

All Things Open

The National Institutes of Health has expanded their data sharing requirements for obtaining funding to now include all awards for research producing scientific data to accelerate “biomedical research discovery, in part, by enabling validation of research results, providing accessibility to high-value datasets, and promoting data reuse for future research studies.” The new policy requiring a Data Management & Sharing Plan (DMSP) for all applications goes into effect January 25th, 2023. A DMSP includes where the data will be stored. This lightning talk will review Open Access Data Repositories. Don’t let the task of trying to find data storage hold you …

Tgdm: Target Guided Dynamic Mixup For Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning, Linhai Zhuo, Yuqian Fu, Jingjing Chen, Yixin Cao, Yu-Gang Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Given sufficient training data on the source domain, cross-domain few-shot learning (CD-FSL) aims at recognizing new classes with a small number of labeled examples on the target domain. The key to addressing CD-FSL is to narrow the domain gap and transferring knowledge of a network trained on the source domain to the target domain. To help knowledge transfer, this paper introduces an intermediate domain generated by mixing images in the source and the target domain. Specifically, to generate the optimal intermediate domain for different target data, we propose a novel target guided dynamic mixup (TGDM) framework that leverages the target …

Hierarchical Hourglass Convolutional Network For Efficient Video Classification, Yi Tan, Yanbin Hao, Hao Zhang, Shuo Wang

PhD Student’s Publications Collection

Videos naturally contain dynamic variation over the temporal axis, which will result in the same visual clues (e.g., semantics, objects) changing their scale, position, and perspective patterns between adjacent frames. A primary trend in video CNN is adopting spatial-2D convolution for spatial semantics and temporal-1D convolution for temporal dynamics. Though the direction achieves a favorable balance between efficiency and efficacy, it suffers from misalignment of visual clues with large displacements. Particularly, rigid temporal convolution would fail to capture correct motions when a specific target moves out of the reception field of temporal convolution between adjacent frames.To tackle large visual displacements …

Adaptive Structural Similarity Preserving For Unsupervised Cross Modal Hashing, Liang Li, Baihua Zheng, Weiwei Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Relation Extraction (RE) is a vital step to complete Knowledge Graph (KG) by extracting entity relations from texts. However, it usually suffers from the long-tail issue. The training data mainly concentrates on a few types of relations, leading to the lack of sufficient annotations for the remaining types of relations. In this paper, we propose a general approach to learn relation prototypes from unlabeled texts, to facilitate the long-tail relation extraction by transferring knowledge from the relation types with sufficient training data. We learn relation prototypes as an implicit factor between entities, which reflects the meanings of relations as well …

Interactive Contrastive Learning For Self-Supervised Entity Alignment, Kaisheng Zeng, Zhenhao Dong, Lei Hou, Yixin Cao, Minghao Hu, Jifan Yu, Xin Lv, Lei Cao, Xin Wang, Haozhuang Liu, Yi Huang, Jing Wan, Juanzi Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Self-supervised entity alignment (EA) aims to link equivalent entities across different knowledge graphs (KGs) without the use of pre-aligned entity pairs. The current state-of-the-art (SOTA) selfsupervised EA approach draws inspiration from contrastive learning, originally designed in computer vision based on instance discrimination and contrastive loss, and suffers from two shortcomings. Firstly, it puts unidirectional emphasis on pushing sampled negative entities far away rather than pulling positively aligned pairs close, as is done in the well-established supervised EA. Secondly, it advocates the minimum information requirement for self-supervised EA, while we argue that self-described KG’s side information (e.g., entity name, relation name, …

Ergo: Event Relational Graph Transformer For Document-Level Event Causality Identification, Meiqi Chen, Yixin Cao, Kunquan Deng, Mukai Li, Kun Wang, Jing Shao, Yan Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Document-level Event Causality Identification (DECI) aims to identify event-event causal relations in a document. Existing works usually build an event graph for global reasoning across multiple sentences. However, the edges between events have to be carefully designed through heuristic rules or external tools. In this paper, we propose a novel Event Relational Graph TransfOrmer (ERGO) framework1 for DECI, to ease the graph construction and improve it over the noisy edge issue. Different from conventional event graphs, we define a pair of events as a node and build a complete event relational graph without any prior knowledge or tools. This naturally …