TruthSR: Trustworthy Sequential Recommender Systems via User-generated Multimodal Content

Sequential recommender systems explore users' preferences and behavioral patterns from their historically generated data. Recently, researchers aim to improve sequential recommendation by utilizing massive user-generated multi-modal content, such as reviews, images, etc. This content often contains inevitable noise. Some studies attempt to reduce noise interference by suppressing cross-modal inconsistent information. However, they could potentially constrain the capturing of personalized user preferences. In addition, it is almost impossible to entirely eliminate noise in diverse user-generated multi-modal content. To solve these problems, we propose a trustworthy sequential recommendation method via noisy user-generated multi-modal content. Specifically, we explicitly capture the consistency and complementarity of user-generated multi-modal content to mitigate noise interference. We also achieve the modeling of the user's multi-modal sequential preferences. In addition, we design a trustworthy decision mechanism that integrates subjective user perspective and objective item perspective to dynamically evaluate the uncertainty of prediction results. Experimental evaluation on four widely-used datasets demonstrates the superior performance of our model compared to state-of-the-art methods. The code is released at https://github.com/FairyMeng/TrustSR.

A Dual Latent State Learning Approach: Exploiting Regional Network Similarities for QoS Prediction

Individual objects, whether users or services, within a specific region often exhibit similar network states due to their shared origin from the same city or autonomous system (AS). Despite this regional network similarity, many existing techniques overlook its potential, resulting in subpar performance arising from challenges such as data sparsity and label imbalance. In this paper, we introduce the regional-based dual latent state learning network(R2SL), a novel deep learning framework designed to overcome the pitfalls of traditional individual object-based prediction techniques in Quality of Service (QoS) prediction. Unlike its predecessors, R2SL captures the nuances of regional network behavior by deriving two distinct regional network latent states: the city-network latent state and the AS-network latent state. These states are constructed utilizing aggregated data from common regions rather than individual object data. Furthermore, R2SL adopts an enhanced Huber loss function that adjusts its linear loss component, providing a remedy for prevalent label imbalance issues. To cap off the prediction process, a multi-scale perception network is leveraged to interpret the integrated feature map, a fusion of regional network latent features and other pertinent information, ultimately accomplishing the QoS prediction. Through rigorous testing on real-world QoS datasets, R2SL demonstrates superior performance compared to prevailing state-of-the-art methods. Our R2SL approach ushers in an innovative avenue for precise QoS predictions by fully harnessing the regional network similarities inherent in objects.

Probabilistic Deep Supervision Network: A Noise-Resilient Approach for QoS Prediction

Quality of Service (QoS) prediction is an essential task in recommendation systems, where accurately predicting unknown QoS values can improve user satisfaction. However, existing QoS prediction techniques may perform poorly in the presence of noise data, such as fake location information or virtual gateways. In this paper, we propose the Probabilistic Deep Supervision Network (PDS-Net), a novel framework for QoS prediction that addresses this issue. PDS-Net utilizes a Gaussian-based probabilistic space to supervise intermediate layers and learns probability spaces for both known features and true labels. Moreover, PDS-Net employs a condition-based multitasking loss function to identify objects with noise data and applies supervision directly to deep features sampled from the probability space by optimizing the Kullback-Leibler distance between the probability space of these objects and the real-label probability space. Thus, PDS-Net effectively reduces errors resulting from the propagation of corrupted data, leading to more accurate QoS predictions. Experimental evaluations on two real-world QoS datasets demonstrate that the proposed PDS-Net outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, validating the effectiveness of our approach.

Plot2API: Recommending Graphic API from Plot via Semantic Parsing Guided Neural Network

Plot-based Graphic API recommendation (Plot2API) is an unstudied but meaningful issue, which has several important applications in the context of software engineering and data visualization, such as the plotting guidance of the beginner, graphic API correlation analysis, and code conversion for plotting. Plot2API is a very challenging task, since each plot is often associated with multiple APIs and the appearances of the graphics drawn by the same API can be extremely varied due to the different settings of the parameters. Additionally, the samples of different APIs also suffer from extremely imbalanced. Considering the lack of technologies in Plot2API, we present a novel deep multi-task learning approach named Semantic Parsing Guided Neural Network (SPGNN) which translates the Plot2API issue as a multi-label image classification and an image semantic parsing tasks for the solution. In SPGNN, the recently advanced Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) named EfficientNet is employed as the backbone network for API recommendation. Meanwhile, a semantic parsing module is complemented to exploit the semantic relevant visual information in feature learning and eliminate the appearance-relevant visual information which may confuse the visual-information-based API recommendation. Moreover, the recent data augmentation technique named random erasing is also applied for alleviating the imbalance of API categories. We collect plots with the graphic APIs used to drawn them from Stack Overflow, and release three new Plot2API datasets corresponding to the graphic APIs of R and Python programming languages for evaluating the effectiveness of Plot2API techniques. Extensive experimental results not only demonstrate the superiority of our method over the recent deep learning baselines but also show the practicability of our method in the recommendation of graphic APIs.

A Probability Distribution and Location-aware ResNet Approach for QoS Prediction

In recent years, the number of online services has grown rapidly, invoke the required services through the cloud platform has become the primary trend. How to help users choose and recommend high-quality services among huge amounts of unused services has become a hot issue in research. Among the existing QoS prediction methods, the collaborative filtering(CF) method can only learn low-dimensional linear characteristics, and its effect is limited by sparse data. Although existing deep learning methods could capture high-dimensional nonlinear features better, most of them only use the single feature of identity, and the problem of network deepening gradient disappearance is serious, so the effect of QoS prediction is unsatisfactory. To address these problems, we propose an advanced probability distribution and location-aware ResNet approach for QoS Prediction(PLRes). This approach considers the historical invocations probability distribution and location characteristics of users and services, and first use the ResNet in QoS prediction to reuses the features, which alleviates the problems of gradient disappearance and model degradation. A series of experiments are conducted on a real-world web service dataset WS-DREAM. The results indicate that PLRes model is effective for QoS prediction and at the density of 5%-30%, which means the data is sparse, it significantly outperforms a state-of-the-art approach LDCF by 12.35%-15.37% in terms of MAE.

A Novel Automation-Assisted Cervical Cancer Reading Method Based on Convolutional Neural Network

While most previous automation-assisted reading methods can improve efficiency, their performance often relies on the success of accurate cell segmentation and hand-craft feature extraction. This paper presents an efficient and totally segmentation-free method for automated cervical cell screening that utilizes modern object detector to directly detect cervical cells or clumps, without the design of specific hand-crafted feature. Specifically, we use the state-of-the-art CNN-based object detection methods, YOLOv3, as our baseline model. In order to improve the classification performance of hard examples which are four highly similar categories, we cascade an additional task-specific classifier. We also investigate the presence of unreliable annotations and cope with them by smoothing the distribution of noisy labels. We comprehensively evaluate our methods on test set which is consisted of 1,014 annotated cervical cell images with size of 4000*3000 and complex cellular situation corresponding to 10 categories. Our model achieves 97.5% sensitivity (Sens) and 67.8% specificity (Spec) on cervical cell image-level screening. Moreover, we obtain a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 63.4% on cervical cell-level diagnosis, and improve the Average Precision (AP) of hard examples which are valuable but difficult to distinguish. Our automation-assisted cervical cell reading method not only achieves cervical cell image-level classification but also provides more detailed location and category information of abnormal cells. The results indicate feasible performance of our method, together with the efficiency and robustness, providing a new idea for future development of computer-assisted reading system in clinical cervical screening.

Efficient Misalignment-Robust Multi-Focus Microscopical Images Fusion

In this paper we propose a very efficient method to fuse the unregistered multi-focus microscopical images based on the speed-up robust features (SURF). Our method follows the pipeline of first registration and then fusion. However, instead of treating the registration and fusion as two completely independent stage, we propose to reuse the determinant of the approximate Hessian generated in SURF detection stage as the corresponding salient response for the final image fusion, thus it enables nearly cost-free saliency map generation. In addition, due to the adoption of SURF scale space representation, our method can generate scale-invariant saliency map which is desired for scale-invariant image fusion. We present an extensive evaluation on the dataset consisting of several groups of unregistered multi-focus 4K ultra HD microscopic images with size of 4112 x 3008. Compared with the state-of-the-art multi-focus image fusion methods, our method is much faster and achieve better results in the visual performance. Our method provides a flexible and efficient way to integrate complementary and redundant information from multiple multi-focus ultra HD unregistered images into a fused image that contains better description than any of the individual input images. Code is available at https://github.com/yiqingmy/JointRF.

Comparison Detector: A novel object detection method for small dataset

Though the object detection has shown great success when the training set is sufficient, there is a serious shortage of generalization in the small dataset scenario. However, we inevitably just get a small one in some application scenarios, especially medicine. In this paper, we propose Comparison detector which still maintains the end-to-end fashion in training and testing, surpassing the state-of-the-art two-stage object detection model on the small dataset. Inspired by one/few-shot learning, we replace the parameter classifier in feature pyramid network(FPN) with the comparison classifier in no-parameters or semi-parameters manner. In fact, a stronger inductive bias is added to the model to simplify the problem and reduce the dependence of data. The performance of our model is evaluated on the cervical cancer pathology test set. When training on the small dataset, it achieves a mAP 26.3% and an AR 35.7%, both improving about 20 points compared to baseline model. Moreover, Comparison detector achieves same mAP performance as the current state-of-the-art model when training on the medium dataset, and improves AR by 4 points. Our method is promising for the development of object detection in small dataset scenario.