ACFormer: Mitigating Non-linearity with Auto Convolutional Encoder for Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting (TSF) faces challenges in modeling complex intra-channel temporal dependencies and inter-channel correlations. Although recent research has highlighted the efficiency of linear architectures in capturing global trends, these models often struggle with non-linear signals. To address this gap, we conducted a systematic receptive field analysis of convolutional neural network (CNN) TSF models. We introduce the "individual receptive field" to uncover granular structural dependencies, revealing that convolutional layers act as feature extractors that mirror channel-wise attention while exhibiting superior robustness to non-linear fluctuations. Based on these insights, we propose ACFormer, an architecture designed to reconcile the efficiency of linear projections with the non-linear feature-extraction power of convolutions. ACFormer captures fine-grained information through a shared compression module, preserves temporal locality via gated attention, and reconstructs variable-specific temporal patterns using an independent patch expansion layer. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that ACFormer consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, effectively mitigating the inherent drawbacks of linear models in capturing high-frequency components.

Process-Aware Procurement Lead Time Prediction for Shipyard Delay Mitigation

Accurately predicting procurement lead time (PLT) remains a challenge in engineered-to-order industries such as shipbuilding and plant construction, where delays in a single key component can disrupt project timelines. In shipyards, pipe spools are critical components; installed deep within hull blocks soon after steel erection, any delay in their procurement can halt all downstream tasks. Recognizing their importance, existing studies predict PLT using the static physical attributes of pipe spools. However, procurement is inherently a dynamic, multi-stakeholder business process involving a continuous sequence of internal and external events at the shipyard, factors often overlooked in traditional approaches. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel framework that combines event logs, dataset records of the procurement events, with static attributes to predict PLT. The temporal attributes of each event are extracted to reflect the continuity and temporal context of the process. Subsequently, a deep sequential neural network combined with a multi-layered perceptron is employed to integrate these static and dynamic features, enabling the model to capture both structural and contextual information in procurement. Comparative experiments are conducted using real-world pipe spool procurement data from a globally renowned South Korean shipbuilding corporation. Three tasks are evaluated, which are production, post-processing, and procurement lead time prediction. The results show a 22.6% to 50.4% improvement in prediction performance in terms of mean absolute error over the best-performing existing approaches across the three tasks. These findings indicate the value of considering procurement process information for more accurate PLT prediction.

CRU: A Novel Neural Architecture for Improving the Predictive Performance of Time-Series Data

The time-series forecasting (TSF) problem is a traditional problem in the field of artificial intelligence. Models such as Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), and GRU (Gate Recurrent Units) have contributed to improving the predictive accuracy of TSF. Furthermore, model structures have been proposed to combine time-series decomposition methods, such as seasonal-trend decomposition using Loess (STL) to ensure improved predictive accuracy. However, because this approach is learned in an independent model for each component, it cannot learn the relationships between time-series components. In this study, we propose a new neural architecture called a correlation recurrent unit (CRU) that can perform time series decomposition within a neural cell and learn correlations (autocorrelation and correlation) between each decomposition component. The proposed neural architecture was evaluated through comparative experiments with previous studies using five univariate time-series datasets and four multivariate time-series data. The results showed that long- and short-term predictive performance was improved by more than 10%. The experimental results show that the proposed CRU is an excellent method for TSF problems compared to other neural architectures.

Automatic Discovery of Multi-perspective Process Model using Reinforcement Learning

Process mining is a methodology for the derivation and analysis of process models based on the event log. When process mining is employed to analyze business processes, the process discovery step, the conformance checking step, and the enhancements step are repeated. If a user wants to analyze a process from multiple perspectives (such as activity perspectives, originator perspectives, and time perspectives), the above procedure, inconveniently, has to be repeated over and over again. Although past studies involving process mining have applied detailed stepwise methodologies, no attempt has been made to incorporate and optimize multi-perspective process mining procedures. This paper contributes to developing a solution approach to this problem. First, we propose an automatic discovery framework of a multi-perspective process model based on deep Q-Learning. Our Dual Experience Replay with Experience Distribution (DERED) approach can automatically perform process model discovery steps, conformance check steps, and enhancements steps. Second, we propose a new method that further optimizes the experience replay (ER) method, one of the key algorithms of deep Q-learning, to improve the learning performance of reinforcement learning agents. Finally, we validate our approach using six real-world event datasets collected in port logistics, steel manufacturing, finance, IT, and government administration. We show that our DERED approach can provide users with multi-perspective, high-quality process models that can be employed more conveniently for multi-perspective process mining.

Metric Learning as a Service with Covariance Embedding

With the emergence of deep learning, metric learning has gained significant popularity in numerous machine learning tasks dealing with complex and large-scale datasets, such as information retrieval, object recognition and recommendation systems. Metric learning aims to maximize and minimize inter- and intra-class similarities. However, existing models mainly rely on distance measures to obtain a separable embedding space and implicitly maximize the intra-class similarity while neglecting the inter-class relationship. We argue that to enable metric learning as a service for high-performance deep learning applications, we should also wisely deal with inter-class relationships to obtain a more advanced and meaningful embedding space representation. In this paper, a novel metric learning is presented as a service methodology that incorporates covariance to signify the direction of the linear relationship between data points in an embedding space. Unlike conventional metric learning, our covariance-embedding-enhanced approach enables metric learning as a service to be more expressive for computing similar or dissimilar measures and can capture positive, negative, or neutral relationships. Extensive experiments conducted using various benchmark datasets, including natural, biomedical, and facial images, demonstrate that the proposed model as a service with covariance-embedding optimizations can obtain higher-quality, more separable, and more expressive embedding representations than existing models.

Semi-supervised binary classification with latent distance learning

Binary classification (BC) is a practical task that is ubiquitous in real-world problems, such as distinguishing healthy and unhealthy objects in biomedical diagnostics and defective and non-defective products in manufacturing inspections. Nonetheless, fully annotated data are commonly required to effectively solve this problem, and their collection by domain experts is a tedious and expensive procedure. In contrast to BC, several significant semi-supervised learning techniques that heavily rely on stochastic data augmentation techniques have been devised for solving multi-class classification. In this study, we demonstrate that the stochastic data augmentation technique is less suitable for solving typical BC problems because it can omit crucial features that strictly distinguish between positive and negative samples. To address this issue, we propose a new learning representation to solve the BC problem using a few labels with a random k-pair cross-distance learning mechanism. First, by harnessing a few labeled samples, the encoder network learns the projection of positive and negative samples in angular spaces to maximize and minimize their inter-class and intra-class distances, respectively. Second, the classifier learns to discriminate between positive and negative samples using on-the-fly labels generated based on the angular space and labeled samples to solve BC tasks. Extensive experiments were conducted using four real-world publicly available BC datasets. With few labels and without any data augmentation techniques, the proposed method outperformed state-of-the-art semi-supervised and self-supervised learning methods. Moreover, with 10% labeling, our semi-supervised classifier could obtain competitive accuracy compared with a fully supervised setting.

Angular triangle distance for ordinal metric learning

Deep metric learning (DML) aims to automatically construct task-specific distances or similarities of data, resulting in a low-dimensional representation. Several significant metric-learning methods have been proposed. Nonetheless, no approach guarantees the preservation of the ordinal nature of the original data in a low-dimensional space. Ordinal data are ubiquitous in real-world problems, such as the severity of symptoms in biomedical cases, production quality in manufacturing, rating level in businesses, and aging level in face recognition. This study proposes a novel angular triangle distance (ATD) and ordinal triplet network (OTD) to obtain an accurate and meaningful embedding space representation for ordinal data. The ATD projects the ordinal relation of data in the angular space, whereas the OTD learns its ordinal projection. We also demonstrated that our new distance measure satisfies the distance metric properties mathematically. The proposed method was assessed using real-world data with an ordinal nature, such as biomedical, facial, and hand-gestured images. Extensive experiments have been conducted, and the results show that our proposed method not only semantically preserves the ordinal nature but is also more accurate than existing DML models. Moreover, we also demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art ordinal metric learning method.