Rumor Detection with a novel graph neural network approach

The wide spread of rumors on social media has caused a negative impact on people's daily life, leading to potential panic, fear, and mental health problems for the public. How to debunk rumors as early as possible remains a challenging problem. Existing studies mainly leverage information propagation structure to detect rumors, while very few works focus on correlation among users that they may coordinate to spread rumors in order to gain large popularity. In this paper, we propose a new detection model, that jointly learns both the representations of user correlation and information propagation to detect rumors on social media. Specifically, we leverage graph neural networks to learn the representations of user correlation from a bipartite graph that describes the correlations between users and source tweets, and the representations of information propagation with a tree structure. Then we combine the learned representations from these two modules to classify the rumors. Since malicious users intend to subvert our model after deployment, we further develop a greedy attack scheme to analyze the cost of three adversarial attacks: graph attack, comment attack, and joint attack. Evaluation results on two public datasets illustrate that the proposed MODEL outperforms the state-of-the-art rumor detection models. We also demonstrate our method performs well for early rumor detection. Moreover, the proposed detection method is more robust to adversarial attacks compared to the best existing method. Importantly, we show that it requires a high cost for attackers to subvert user correlation pattern, demonstrating the importance of considering user correlation for rumor detection.

Image Captioning in news report scenario

Image captioning strives to generate pertinent captions for specified images, situating itself at the crossroads of Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). This endeavor is of paramount importance with far-reaching applications in recommendation systems, news outlets, social media, and beyond. Particularly within the realm of news reporting, captions are expected to encompass detailed information, such as the identities of celebrities captured in the images. However, much of the existing body of work primarily centers around understanding scenes and actions. In this paper, we explore the realm of image captioning specifically tailored for celebrity photographs, illustrating its broad potential for enhancing news industry practices. This exploration aims to augment automated news content generation, thereby facilitating a more nuanced dissemination of information. Our endeavor shows a broader horizon, enriching the narrative in news reporting through a more intuitive image captioning framework.

Accelerating Semi-Asynchronous Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm that allows clients to train models on their data while preserving their privacy. FL algorithms, such as Federated Averaging (FedAvg) and its variants, have been shown to converge well in many scenarios. However, these methods require clients to upload their local updates to the server in a synchronous manner, which can be slow and unreliable in realistic FL settings. To address this issue, researchers have developed asynchronous FL methods that allow clients to continue training on their local data using a stale global model. However, most of these methods simply aggregate all of the received updates without considering their relative contributions, which can slow down convergence. In this paper, we propose a contribution-aware asynchronous FL method that takes into account the staleness and statistical heterogeneity of the received updates. Our method dynamically adjusts the contribution of each update based on these factors, which can speed up convergence compared to existing methods.

News Recommendation with Attention Mechanism

This paper explores the area of news recommendation, a key component of online information sharing. Initially, we provide a clear introduction to news recommendation, defining the core problem and summarizing current methods and notable recent algorithms. We then present our work on implementing the NRAM (News Recommendation with Attention Mechanism), an attention-based approach for news recommendation, and assess its effectiveness. Our evaluation shows that NRAM has the potential to significantly improve how news content is personalized for users on digital news platforms.

Particle Filter SLAM for Vehicle Localization

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) presents a formidable challenge in robotics, involving the dynamic construction of a map while concurrently determining the precise location of the robotic agent within an unfamiliar environment. This intricate task is further compounded by the inherent "chicken-and-egg" dilemma, where accurate mapping relies on a dependable estimation of the robot's location, and vice versa. Moreover, the computational intensity of SLAM adds an additional layer of complexity, making it a crucial yet demanding topic in the field. In our research, we address the challenges of SLAM by adopting the Particle Filter SLAM method. Our approach leverages encoded data and fiber optic gyro (FOG) information to enable precise estimation of vehicle motion, while lidar technology contributes to environmental perception by providing detailed insights into surrounding obstacles. The integration of these data streams culminates in the establishment of a Particle Filter SLAM framework, representing a key endeavor in this paper to effectively navigate and overcome the complexities associated with simultaneous localization and mapping in robotic systems.