TabTreeFormer: Tabular Data Generation Using Hybrid Tree-Transformer

Transformers have achieved remarkable success in tabular data generation. However, they lack domain-specific inductive biases which are critical to preserving the intrinsic characteristics of tabular data. Meanwhile, they suffer from poor scalability and efficiency due to quadratic computational complexity. In this paper, we propose TabTreeFormer, a hybrid transformer architecture that incorporates a tree-based model that retains tabular-specific inductive biases of non-smooth and potentially low-correlated patterns caused by discreteness and non-rotational invariance, and hence enhances the fidelity and utility of synthetic data. In addition, we devise a dual-quantization tokenizer to capture the multimodal continuous distribution and further facilitate the learning of numerical value distribution. Moreover, our proposed tokenizer reduces the vocabulary size and sequence length due to the limited complexity (e.g., dimension-wise semantic meaning) of tabular data, rendering a significant model size shrink without sacrificing the capability of the transformer model. We evaluate TabTreeFormer on 10 datasets against multiple generative models on various metrics; our experimental results show that TabTreeFormer achieves superior fidelity, utility, privacy, and efficiency. Our best model yields a 40% utility improvement with 1/16 of the baseline model size.

AIDE: Task-Specific Fine Tuning with Attribute Guided Multi-Hop Data Expansion

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for specific tasks requires high-quality, diverse training data relevant to the task. Recent research has leveraged LLMs to synthesize training data, but existing approaches either depend on large seed datasets or struggle to ensure both task relevance and data diversity in the generated outputs. To address these challenges, we propose AIDE, a novel data synthesis framework that uses a multi-hop process to expand 10 seed data points while ensuring diversity and task relevance. AIDE extracts the main topic and key knowledge attributes from the seed data to guide the synthesis process. In each subsequent hop, it extracts the topic and attributes from the newly generated data and continues guided synthesis. This process repeats for a total of K hops. To prevent irrelevant data generation as the hop depth increases, AIDE incorporates a residual connection mechanism and uses self-reflection to improve data quality. Our empirical results demonstrate that fine-tuning Mistral-7B, Llama-3.1-8B and Llama-3.2-3B with AIDE achieves more than 10% accuracy improvements over the base models across 13 tasks from 5 different benchmarks, while outperforming the models fine-tuned with state-of-the-art data synthesis methods like Evol-Instruct, DataTune and Prompt2Model.

High-Dimensional Tensor Discriminant Analysis with Incomplete Tensors

Tensor classification has gained prominence across various fields, yet the challenge of handling partially observed tensor data in real-world applications remains largely unaddressed. This paper introduces a novel approach to tensor classification with incomplete data, framed within the tensor high-dimensional linear discriminant analysis. Specifically, we consider a high-dimensional tensor predictor with missing observations under the Missing Completely at Random (MCR) assumption and employ the Tensor Gaussian Mixture Model to capture the relationship between the tensor predictor and class label. We propose the Tensor LDA-MD algorithm, which manages high-dimensional tensor predictors with missing entries by leveraging the low-rank structure of the discriminant tensor. A key feature of our approach is a novel covariance estimation method under the tensor-based MCR model, supported by theoretical results that allow for correlated entries under mild conditions. Our work establishes the convergence rate of the estimation error of the discriminant tensor with incomplete data and minimax optimal bounds for the misclassification rate, addressing key gaps in the literature. Additionally, we derive large deviation results for the generalized mode-wise (separable) sample covariance matrix and its inverse, which are crucial tools in our analysis and hold independent interest. Our method demonstrates excellent performance in simulations and real data analysis, even with significant proportions of missing data. This research advances high-dimensional LDA and tensor learning, providing practical tools for applications with incomplete data and a solid theoretical foundation for classification accuracy in complex settings.

TAEGAN: Generating Synthetic Tabular Data For Data Augmentation

Synthetic tabular data generation has gained significant attention for its potential in data augmentation, software testing and privacy-preserving data sharing. However, most research has primarily focused on larger datasets and evaluating their quality in terms of metrics like column-wise statistical distributions and inter-feature correlations, while often overlooking its utility for data augmentation, particularly for datasets whose data is scarce. In this paper, we propose Tabular Auto-Encoder Generative Adversarial Network (TAEGAN), an improved GAN-based framework for generating high-quality tabular data. Although large language models (LLMs)-based methods represent the state-of-the-art in synthetic tabular data generation, they are often overkill for small datasets due to their extensive size and complexity. TAEGAN employs a masked auto-encoder as the generator, which for the first time introduces the power of self-supervised pre-training in tabular data generation so that essentially exposes the networks to more information. We extensively evaluate TAEGAN against five state-of-the-art synthetic tabular data generation algorithms. Results from 10 datasets show that TAEGAN outperforms existing deep-learning-based tabular data generation models on 9 out of 10 datasets on the machine learning efficacy and achieves superior data augmentation performance on 7 out of 8 smaller datasets.

CombU: A Combined Unit Activation for Fitting Mathematical Expressions with Neural Networks

The activation functions are fundamental to neural networks as they introduce non-linearity into data relationships, thereby enabling deep networks to approximate complex data relations. Existing efforts to enhance neural network performance have predominantly focused on developing new mathematical functions. However, we find that a well-designed combination of existing activation functions within a neural network can also achieve this objective. In this paper, we introduce the Combined Units activation (CombU), which employs different activation functions at various dimensions across different layers. This approach can be theoretically proven to fit most mathematical expressions accurately. The experiments conducted on four mathematical expression datasets, compared against six State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) activation function algorithms, demonstrate that CombU outperforms all SOTA algorithms in 10 out of 16 metrics and ranks in the top three for the remaining six metrics.

ReChorus2.0: A Modular and Task-Flexible Recommendation Library

With the applications of recommendation systems rapidly expanding, an increasing number of studies have focused on every aspect of recommender systems with different data inputs, models, and task settings. Therefore, a flexible library is needed to help researchers implement the experimental strategies they require. Existing open libraries for recommendation scenarios have enabled reproducing various recommendation methods and provided standard implementations. However, these libraries often impose certain restrictions on data and seldom support the same model to perform different tasks and input formats, limiting users from customized explorations. To fill the gap, we propose ReChorus2.0, a modular and task-flexible library for recommendation researchers. Based on ReChorus, we upgrade the supported input formats, models, and training&evaluation strategies to help realize more recommendation tasks with more data types. The main contributions of ReChorus2.0 include: (1) Realization of complex and practical tasks, including reranking and CTR prediction tasks; (2) Inclusion of various context-aware and rerank recommenders; (3) Extension of existing and new models to support different tasks with the same models; (4) Support of highly-customized input with impression logs, negative items, or click labels, as well as user, item, and situation contexts. To summarize, ReChorus2.0 serves as a comprehensive and flexible library better aligning with the practical problems in the recommendation scenario and catering to more diverse research needs. The implementation and detailed tutorials of ReChorus2.0 can be found at https://github.com/THUwangcy/ReChorus.

Introducing EEG Analyses to Help Personal Music Preference Prediction

Nowadays, personalized recommender systems play an increasingly important role in music scenarios in our daily life with the preference prediction ability. However, existing methods mainly rely on users' implicit feedback (e.g., click, dwell time) which ignores the detailed user experience. This paper introduces Electroencephalography (EEG) signals to personal music preferences as a basis for the personalized recommender system. To realize collection in daily life, we use a dry-electrodes portable device to collect data. We perform a user study where participants listen to music and record preferences and moods. Meanwhile, EEG signals are collected with a portable device. Analysis of the collected data indicates a significant relationship between music preference, mood, and EEG signals. Furthermore, we conduct experiments to predict personalized music preference with the features of EEG signals. Experiments show significant improvement in rating prediction and preference classification with the help of EEG. Our work demonstrates the possibility of introducing EEG signals in personal music preference with portable devices. Moreover, our approach is not restricted to the music scenario, and the EEG signals as explicit feedback can be used in personalized recommendation tasks.

H2RSVLM: Towards Helpful and Honest Remote Sensing Large Vision Language Model

The generic large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is rapidly developing, but still perform poorly in Remote Sensing (RS) domain, which is due to the unique and specialized nature of RS imagery and the comparatively limited spatial perception of current VLMs. Existing Remote Sensing specific Vision Language Models (RSVLMs) still have considerable potential for improvement, primarily owing to the lack of large-scale, high-quality RS vision-language datasets. We constructed HqDC-1.4M, the large scale High quality and Detailed Captions for RS images, containing 1.4 million image-caption pairs, which not only enhance the RSVLM's understanding of RS images but also significantly improve the model's spatial perception abilities, such as localization and counting, thereby increasing the helpfulness of the RSVLM. Moreover, to address the inevitable "hallucination" problem in RSVLM, we developed RSSA, the first dataset aimed at enhancing the Self-Awareness capability of RSVLMs. By incorporating a variety of unanswerable questions into typical RS visual question-answering tasks, RSSA effectively improves the truthfulness and reduces the hallucinations of the model's outputs, thereby enhancing the honesty of the RSVLM. Based on these datasets, we proposed the H2RSVLM, the Helpful and Honest Remote Sensing Vision Language Model. H2RSVLM has achieved outstanding performance on multiple RS public datasets and is capable of recognizing and refusing to answer the unanswerable questions, effectively mitigating the incorrect generations. We will release the code, data and model weights at https://github.com/opendatalab/H2RSVLM .

Aiming at the Target: Filter Collaborative Information for Cross-Domain Recommendation

Cross-domain recommender (CDR) systems aim to enhance the performance of the target domain by utilizing data from other related domains. However, irrelevant information from the source domain may instead degrade target domain performance, which is known as the negative transfer problem. There have been some attempts to address this problem, mostly by designing adaptive representations for overlapped users. Whereas, representation adaptions solely rely on the expressive capacity of the CDR model, lacking explicit constraint to filter the irrelevant source-domain collaborative information for the target domain. In this paper, we propose a novel Collaborative information regularized User Transformation (CUT) framework to tackle the negative transfer problem by directly filtering users' collaborative information. In CUT, user similarity in the target domain is adopted as a constraint for user transformation learning to filter the user collaborative information from the source domain. CUT first learns user similarity relationships from the target domain. Then, source-target information transfer is guided by the user similarity, where we design a user transformation layer to learn target-domain user representations and a contrastive loss to supervise the user collaborative information transferred. The results show significant performance improvement of CUT compared with SOTA single and cross-domain methods. Further analysis of the target-domain results illustrates that CUT can effectively alleviate the negative transfer problem.

A Parallel Attention Network for Cattle Face Recognition

Cattle face recognition holds paramount significance in domains such as animal husbandry and behavioral research. Despite significant progress in confined environments, applying these accomplishments in wild settings remains challenging. Thus, we create the first large-scale cattle face recognition dataset, ICRWE, for wild environments. It encompasses 483 cattle and 9,816 high-resolution image samples. Each sample undergoes annotation for face features, light conditions, and face orientation. Furthermore, we introduce a novel parallel attention network, PANet. Comprising several cascaded Transformer modules, each module incorporates two parallel Position Attention Modules (PAM) and Feature Mapping Modules (FMM). PAM focuses on local and global features at each image position through parallel channel attention, and FMM captures intricate feature patterns through non-linear mappings. Experimental results indicate that PANet achieves a recognition accuracy of 88.03% on the ICRWE dataset, establishing itself as the current state-of-the-art approach. The source code is available in the supplementary materials.