DroughtSet: Understanding Drought Through Spatial-Temporal Learning

Drought is one of the most destructive and expensive natural disasters, severely impacting natural resources and risks by depleting water resources and diminishing agricultural yields. Under climate change, accurately predicting drought is critical for mitigating drought-induced risks. However, the intricate interplay among the physical and biological drivers that regulate droughts limits the predictability and understanding of drought, particularly at a subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) time scale. While deep learning has been demonstrated with potential in addressing climate forecasting challenges, its application to drought prediction has received relatively less attention. In this work, we propose a new dataset, DroughtSet, which integrates relevant predictive features and three drought indices from multiple remote sensing and reanalysis datasets across the contiguous United States (CONUS). DroughtSet specifically provides the machine learning community with a new real-world dataset to benchmark drought prediction models and more generally, time-series forecasting methods. Furthermore, we propose a spatial-temporal model SPDrought to predict and interpret S2S droughts. Our model learns from the spatial and temporal information of physical and biological features to predict three types of droughts simultaneously. Multiple strategies are employed to quantify the importance of physical and biological features for drought prediction. Our results provide insights for researchers to better understand the predictability and sensitivity of drought to biological and physical conditions. We aim to contribute to the climate field by proposing a new tool to predict and understand the occurrence of droughts and provide the AI community with a new benchmark to study deep learning applications in climate science.

Graph Domain Adaptation with Dual-branch Encoder and Two-level Alignment for Whole Slide Image-based Survival Prediction

In recent years, histopathological whole slide image (WSI)- based survival analysis has attracted much attention in medical image analysis. In practice, WSIs usually come from different hospitals or laboratories, which can be seen as different domains, and thus may have significant differences in imaging equipment, processing procedures, and sample sources. These differences generally result in large gaps in distribution between different WSI domains, and thus the survival analysis models trained on one domain may fail to transfer to another. To address this issue, we propose a Dual-branch Encoder and Two-level Alignment (DETA) framework to explore both feature and category-level alignment between different WSI domains. Specifically, we first formulate the concerned problem as graph domain adaptation (GDA) by virtue the graph representation of WSIs. Then we construct a dual-branch graph encoder, including the message passing branch and the shortest path branch, to explicitly and implicitly extract semantic information from the graph-represented WSIs. To realize GDA, we propose a two-level alignment approach: at the category level, we develop a coupling technique by virtue of the dual-branch structure, leading to reduced divergence between the category distributions of the two domains; at the feature level, we introduce an adversarial perturbation strategy to better augment source domain feature, resulting in improved alignment in feature distribution. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first attempt to alleviate the domain shift issue for WSI data analysis. Extensive experiments on four TCGA datasets have validated the effectiveness of our proposed DETA framework and demonstrated its superior performance in WSI-based survival analysis.

Enhancing Underwater Imaging with 4-D Light Fields: Dataset and Method

In this paper, we delve into the realm of 4-D light fields (LFs) to enhance underwater imaging plagued by light absorption, scattering, and other challenges. Contrasting with conventional 2-D RGB imaging, 4-D LF imaging excels in capturing scenes from multiple perspectives, thereby indirectly embedding geometric information. This intrinsic property is anticipated to effectively address the challenges associated with underwater imaging. By leveraging both explicit and implicit depth cues present in 4-D LF images, we propose a progressive, mutually reinforcing framework for underwater 4-D LF image enhancement and depth estimation. Specifically, our framework explicitly utilizes estimated depth information alongside implicit depth-related dynamic convolutional kernels to modulate output features. The entire framework decomposes this complex task, iteratively optimizing the enhanced image and depth information to progressively achieve optimal enhancement results. More importantly, we construct the first 4-D LF-based underwater image dataset for quantitative evaluation and supervised training of learning-based methods, comprising 75 underwater scenes and 3675 high-resolution 2K pairs. To craft vibrant and varied underwater scenes, we build underwater environments with various objects and adopt several types of degradation. Through extensive experimentation, we showcase the potential and superiority of 4-D LF-based underwater imaging vis-a-vis traditional 2-D RGB-based approaches. Moreover, our method effectively corrects color bias and achieves state-of-the-art performance. The dataset and code will be publicly available at https://github.com/linlos1234/LFUIE.

Blind Image Deconvolution by Generative-based Kernel Prior and Initializer via Latent Encoding

Blind image deconvolution (BID) is a classic yet challenging problem in the field of image processing. Recent advances in deep image prior (DIP) have motivated a series of DIP-based approaches, demonstrating remarkable success in BID. However, due to the high non-convexity of the inherent optimization process, these methods are notorious for their sensitivity to the initialized kernel. To alleviate this issue and further improve their performance, we propose a new framework for BID that better considers the prior modeling and the initialization for blur kernels, leveraging a deep generative model. The proposed approach pre-trains a generative adversarial network-based kernel generator that aptly characterizes the kernel priors and a kernel initializer that facilitates a well-informed initialization for the blur kernel through latent space encoding. With the pre-trained kernel generator and initializer, one can obtain a high-quality initialization of the blur kernel, and enable optimization within a compact latent kernel manifold. Such a framework results in an evident performance improvement over existing DIP-based BID methods. Extensive experiments on different datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

An effective software risk prediction management analysis of data using machine learning and data mining method

For one to guarantee higher-quality software development processes, risk management is essential. Furthermore, risks are those that could negatively impact an organization's operations or a project's progress. The appropriate prioritisation of software project risks is a crucial factor in ascertaining the software project's performance features and eventual success. They can be used harmoniously with the same training samples and have good complement and compatibility. We carried out in-depth tests on four benchmark datasets to confirm the efficacy of our CIA approach in closed-world and open-world scenarios, with and without defence. We also present a sequential augmentation parameter optimisation technique that captures the interdependencies of the latest deep learning state-of-the-art WF attack models. To achieve precise software risk assessment, the enhanced crow search algorithm (ECSA) is used to modify the ANFIS settings. Solutions that very slightly alter the local optimum and stay inside it are extracted using the ECSA. ANFIS variable when utilising the ANFIS technique. An experimental validation with NASA 93 dataset and 93 software project values was performed. This method's output presents a clear image of the software risk elements that are essential to achieving project performance. The results of our experiments show that, when compared to other current methods, our integrative fuzzy techniques may perform more accurately and effectively in the evaluation of software project risks.

InternLM2 Technical Report

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 has sparked discussions on the advent of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). However, replicating such advancements in open-source models has been challenging. This paper introduces InternLM2, an open-source LLM that outperforms its predecessors in comprehensive evaluations across 6 dimensions and 30 benchmarks, long-context modeling, and open-ended subjective evaluations through innovative pre-training and optimization techniques. The pre-training process of InternLM2 is meticulously detailed, highlighting the preparation of diverse data types including text, code, and long-context data. InternLM2 efficiently captures long-term dependencies, initially trained on 4k tokens before advancing to 32k tokens in pre-training and fine-tuning stages, exhibiting remarkable performance on the 200k ``Needle-in-a-Haystack" test. InternLM2 is further aligned using Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and a novel Conditional Online Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (COOL RLHF) strategy that addresses conflicting human preferences and reward hacking. By releasing InternLM2 models in different training stages and model sizes, we provide the community with insights into the model's evolution.

Breaking the Barrier: Utilizing Large Language Models for Industrial Recommendation Systems through an Inferential Knowledge Graph

Recommendation systems are widely used in e-commerce websites and online platforms to address information overload. However, existing systems primarily rely on historical data and user feedback, making it difficult to capture user intent transitions. Recently, Knowledge Base (KB)-based models are proposed to incorporate expert knowledge, but it struggle to adapt to new items and the evolving e-commerce environment. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Large Language Model based Complementary Knowledge Enhanced Recommendation System (LLM-KERec). It introduces an entity extractor that extracts unified concept terms from item and user information. To provide cost-effective and reliable prior knowledge, entity pairs are generated based on entity popularity and specific strategies. The large language model determines complementary relationships in each entity pair, constructing a complementary knowledge graph. Furthermore, a new complementary recall module and an Entity-Entity-Item (E-E-I) weight decision model refine the scoring of the ranking model using real complementary exposure-click samples. Extensive experiments conducted on three industry datasets demonstrate the significant performance improvement of our model compared to existing approaches. Additionally, detailed analysis shows that LLM-KERec enhances users' enthusiasm for consumption by recommending complementary items. In summary, LLM-KERec addresses the limitations of traditional recommendation systems by incorporating complementary knowledge and utilizing a large language model to capture user intent transitions, adapt to new items, and enhance recommendation efficiency in the evolving e-commerce landscape.

The Future of Cognitive Strategy-enhanced Persuasive Dialogue Agents: New Perspectives and Trends

Persuasion, as one of the crucial abilities in human communication, has garnered extensive attention from researchers within the field of intelligent dialogue systems. We humans tend to persuade others to change their viewpoints, attitudes or behaviors through conversations in various scenarios (e.g., persuasion for social good, arguing in online platforms). Developing dialogue agents that can persuade others to accept certain standpoints is essential to achieving truly intelligent and anthropomorphic dialogue system. Benefiting from the substantial progress of Large Language Models (LLMs), dialogue agents have acquired an exceptional capability in context understanding and response generation. However, as a typical and complicated cognitive psychological system, persuasive dialogue agents also require knowledge from the domain of cognitive psychology to attain a level of human-like persuasion. Consequently, the cognitive strategy-enhanced persuasive dialogue agent (defined as CogAgent), which incorporates cognitive strategies to achieve persuasive targets through conversation, has become a predominant research paradigm. To depict the research trends of CogAgent, in this paper, we first present several fundamental cognitive psychology theories and give the formalized definition of three typical cognitive strategies, including the persuasion strategy, the topic path planning strategy, and the argument structure prediction strategy. Then we propose a new system architecture by incorporating the formalized definition to lay the foundation of CogAgent. Representative works are detailed and investigated according to the combined cognitive strategy, followed by the summary of authoritative benchmarks and evaluation metrics. Finally, we summarize our insights on open issues and future directions of CogAgent for upcoming researchers.

Guided Image Restoration via Simultaneous Feature and Image Guided Fusion

Guided image restoration (GIR), such as guided depth map super-resolution and pan-sharpening, aims to enhance a target image using guidance information from another image of the same scene. Currently, joint image filtering-inspired deep learning-based methods represent the state-of-the-art for GIR tasks. Those methods either deal with GIR in an end-to-end way by elaborately designing filtering-oriented deep neural network (DNN) modules, focusing on the feature-level fusion of inputs; or explicitly making use of the traditional joint filtering mechanism by parameterizing filtering coefficients with DNNs, working on image-level fusion. The former ones are good at recovering contextual information but tend to lose fine-grained details, while the latter ones can better retain textual information but might lead to content distortions. In this work, to inherit the advantages of both methodologies while mitigating their limitations, we proposed a Simultaneous Feature and Image Guided Fusion (SFIGF) network, that simultaneously considers feature and image-level guided fusion following the guided filter (GF) mechanism. In the feature domain, we connect the cross-attention (CA) with GF, and propose a GF-inspired CA module for better feature-level fusion; in the image domain, we fully explore the GF mechanism and design GF-like structure for better image-level fusion. Since guided fusion is implemented in both feature and image domains, the proposed SFIGF is expected to faithfully reconstruct both contextual and textual information from sources and thus lead to better GIR results. We apply SFIGF to 4 typical GIR tasks, and experimental results on these tasks demonstrate its effectiveness and general availability.

Long-tail Augmented Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) has demonstrated promising results for recommender systems, as they can effectively leverage high-order relationship. However, these methods usually encounter data sparsity issue in real-world scenarios. To address this issue, GCN-based recommendation methods employ contrastive learning to introduce self-supervised signals. Despite their effectiveness, these methods lack consideration of the significant degree disparity between head and tail nodes. This can lead to non-uniform representation distribution, which is a crucial factor for the performance of contrastive learning methods. To tackle the above issue, we propose a novel Long-tail Augmented Graph Contrastive Learning (LAGCL) method for recommendation. Specifically, we introduce a learnable long-tail augmentation approach to enhance tail nodes by supplementing predicted neighbor information, and generate contrastive views based on the resulting augmented graph. To make the data augmentation schema learnable, we design an auto drop module to generate pseudo-tail nodes from head nodes and a knowledge transfer module to reconstruct the head nodes from pseudo-tail nodes. Additionally, we employ generative adversarial networks to ensure that the distribution of the generated tail/head nodes matches that of the original tail/head nodes. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the significant improvement in performance of our model over the state-of-the-arts. Further analyses demonstrate the uniformity of learned representations and the superiority of LAGCL on long-tail performance. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/im0qianqian/LAGCL