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The denoising model has been proven a powerful generative model but has little exploration of discriminative tasks. Representation learning is important in discriminative tasks, which is defined as "learning representations (or features) of the data that make it easier to extract useful information when building classifiers or other predictors". In this paper, we propose a novel Denoising Model for Representation Learning (DenoiseRep) to improve feature discrimination with joint feature extraction and denoising. DenoiseRep views each embedding layer in a backbone as a denoising layer, processing the cascaded embedding layers as if we are recursively denoise features step-by-step. This unifies the frameworks of feature extraction and denoising, where the former progressively embeds features from low-level to high-level, and the latter recursively denoises features step-by-step. After that, DenoiseRep fuses the parameters of feature extraction and denoising layers, and theoretically demonstrates its equivalence before and after the fusion, thus making feature denoising computation-free. DenoiseRep is a label-free algorithm that incrementally improves features but also complementary to the label if available. Experimental results on various discriminative vision tasks, including re-identification (Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID, MSMT17, CUHK-03, vehicleID), image classification (ImageNet, UB200, Oxford-Pet, Flowers), object detection (COCO), image segmentation (ADE20K) show stability and impressive improvements. We also validate its effectiveness on the CNN (ResNet) and Transformer (ViT, Swin, Vmamda) architectures., Comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 2024 (Oral)

Conversational Recommender System (CRS) leverages real-time feedback from users to dynamically model their preferences, thereby enhancing the system's ability to provide personalized recommendations and improving the overall user experience. CRS has demonstrated significant promise, prompting researchers to concentrate their efforts on developing user simulators that are both more realistic and trustworthy. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has marked the onset of a new epoch in computational capabilities, exhibiting human-level intelligence in various tasks. Research efforts have been made to utilize LLMs for building user simulators to evaluate the performance of CRS. Although these efforts showcase innovation, they are accompanied by certain limitations. In this work, we introduce a Controllable, Scalable, and Human-Involved (CSHI) simulator framework that manages the behavior of user simulators across various stages via a plugin manager. CSHI customizes the simulation of user behavior and interactions to provide a more lifelike and convincing user interaction experience. Through experiments and case studies in two conversational recommendation scenarios, we show that our framework can adapt to a variety of conversational recommendation settings and effectively simulate users' personalized preferences. Consequently, our simulator is able to generate feedback that closely mirrors that of real users. This facilitates a reliable assessment of existing CRS studies and promotes the creation of high-quality conversational recommendation datasets.

Recently, recommender system has achieved significant success. However, due to the openness of recommender systems, they remain vulnerable to malicious attacks. Additionally, natural noise in training data and issues such as data sparsity can also degrade the performance of recommender systems. Therefore, enhancing the robustness of recommender systems has become an increasingly important research topic. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of the robustness of recommender systems. Based on our investigation, we categorize the robustness of recommender systems into adversarial robustness and non-adversarial robustness. In the adversarial robustness, we introduce the fundamental principles and classical methods of recommender system adversarial attacks and defenses. In the non-adversarial robustness, we analyze non-adversarial robustness from the perspectives of data sparsity, natural noise, and data imbalance. Additionally, we summarize commonly used datasets and evaluation metrics for evaluating the robustness of recommender systems. Finally, we also discuss the current challenges in the field of recommender system robustness and potential future research directions. Additionally, to facilitate fair and efficient evaluation of attack and defense methods in adversarial robustness, we propose an adversarial robustness evaluation library--ShillingREC, and we conduct evaluations of basic attack models and recommendation models. ShillingREC project is released at https://github.com/chengleileilei/ShillingREC.

Existing works have made strides in video generation, but the lack of sound effects (SFX) and background music (BGM) hinders a complete and immersive viewer experience. We introduce a novel semantically consistent v ideo-to-audio generation framework, namely SVA, which automatically generates audio semantically consistent with the given video content. The framework harnesses the power of multimodal large language model (MLLM) to understand video semantics from a key frame and generate creative audio schemes, which are then utilized as prompts for text-to-audio models, resulting in video-to-audio generation with natural language as an interface. We show the satisfactory performance of SVA through case study and discuss the limitations along with the future research direction. The project page is available at https://huiz-a.github.io/audio4video.github.io/.

Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and federated learning (FL) in smart transportation has raised critical issues regarding their responsible use. Ensuring responsible AI is paramount for the stability and sustainability of intelligent transportation systems. Despite its importance, research on the responsible application of AI and FL in this domain remains nascent, with a paucity of in-depth investigations into their confluence. Our study analyzes the roles of FL in smart transportation, as well as the promoting effect of responsible AI on distributed smart transportation. Lastly, we discuss the challenges of developing and implementing responsible FL in smart transportation and propose potential solutions. By integrating responsible AI and federated learning, intelligent transportation systems are expected to achieve a higher degree of intelligence, personalization, safety, and transparency.

Large language models (LLMs), renowned for their impressive capabilities in various tasks, have significantly advanced artificial intelligence. Yet, these advancements have raised growing concerns about privacy and security implications. To address these issues and explain the risks inherent in these models, we have devised a three-tiered progressive framework tailored for evaluating privacy in language systems. This framework consists of progressively complex and in-depth privacy test tasks at each tier. Our primary objective is to comprehensively evaluate the sensitivity of large language models to private information, examining how effectively they discern, manage, and safeguard sensitive data in diverse scenarios. This systematic evaluation helps us understand the degree to which these models comply with privacy protection guidelines and the effectiveness of their inherent safeguards against privacy breaches. Our observations indicate that existing Chinese large language models universally show privacy protection shortcomings. It seems that at the moment this widespread issue is unavoidable and may pose corresponding privacy risks in applications based on these models., Comment: 11 pages

Conversational Recommender System (CRS) interacts with users through natural language to understand their preferences and provide personalized recommendations in real-time. CRS has demonstrated significant potential, prompting researchers to address the development of more realistic and reliable user simulators as a key focus. Recently, the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have attracted a lot of attention in various fields. Simultaneously, efforts are underway to construct user simulators based on LLMs. While these works showcase innovation, they also come with certain limitations that require attention. In this work, we aim to analyze the limitations of using LLMs in constructing user simulators for CRS, to guide future research. To achieve this goal, we conduct analytical validation on the notable work, iEvaLM. Through multiple experiments on two widely-used datasets in the field of conversational recommendation, we highlight several issues with the current evaluation methods for user simulators based on LLMs: (1) Data leakage, which occurs in conversational history and the user simulator's replies, results in inflated evaluation results. (2) The success of CRS recommendations depends more on the availability and quality of conversational history than on the responses from user simulators. (3) Controlling the output of the user simulator through a single prompt template proves challenging. To overcome these limitations, we propose SimpleUserSim, employing a straightforward strategy to guide the topic toward the target items. Our study validates the ability of CRS models to utilize the interaction information, significantly improving the recommendation results.

Synthesizing pseudo samples is currently the most effective way to solve the Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) problem. Most models achieve competitive performance but still suffer from two problems: (1) Feature confounding, the overall representations confound task-correlated and task-independent features, and existing models disentangle them in a generative way, but they are unreasonable to synthesize reliable pseudo samples with limited samples; (2) Distribution uncertainty, that massive data is needed when existing models synthesize samples from the uncertain distribution, which causes poor performance in limited samples of seen classes. In this paper, we propose a non-generative model to address these problems correspondingly in two modules: (1) Task-correlated feature disentanglement, to exclude the task-correlated features from task-independent ones by adversarial learning of domain adaption towards reasonable synthesis; (2) Controllable pseudo sample synthesis, to synthesize edge-pseudo and center-pseudo samples with certain characteristics towards more diversity generated and intuitive transfer. In addation, to describe the new scene that is the limit seen class samples in the training process, we further formulate a new ZSL task named the 'Few-shot Seen class and Zero-shot Unseen class learning' (FSZU). Extensive experiments on four benchmarks verify that the proposed method is competitive in the GZSL and the FSZU tasks., Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures

The cold-start recommendation is an urgent problem in contemporary online applications. It aims to provide users whose behaviors are literally sparse with as accurate recommendations as possible. Many data-driven algorithms, such as the widely used matrix factorization, underperform because of data sparseness. This work adopts the idea of meta-learning to solve the user's cold-start recommendation problem. We propose a meta-learning based cold-start sequential recommendation framework called metaCSR, including three main components: Diffusion Representer for learning better user/item embedding through information diffusion on the interaction graph; Sequential Recommender for capturing temporal dependencies of behavior sequences; Meta Learner for extracting and propagating transferable knowledge of prior users and learning a good initialization for new users. metaCSR holds the ability to learn the common patterns from regular users' behaviors and optimize the initialization so that the model can quickly adapt to new users after one or a few gradient updates to achieve optimal performance. The extensive quantitative experiments on three widely-used datasets show the remarkable performance of metaCSR in dealing with user cold-start problem. Meanwhile, a series of qualitative analysis demonstrates that the proposed metaCSR has good generalization.

The traditional recommendation systems mainly use offline user data to train offline models, and then recommend items for online users, thus suffering from the unreliable estimation of user preferences based on sparse and noisy historical data. Conversational Recommendation System (CRS) uses the interactive form of the dialogue systems to solve the intrinsic problems of traditional recommendation systems. However, due to the lack of contextual information modeling, the existing CRS models are unable to deal with the exploitation and exploration (E&E) problem well, resulting in the heavy burden on users. To address the aforementioned issue, this work proposes a contextual information enhancement model tailored for CRS, called Knowledge Graph-enhanced Sampling (KGenSam). KGenSam integrates the dynamic graph of user interaction data with the external knowledge into one heterogeneous Knowledge Graph (KG) as the contextual information environment. Then, two samplers are designed to enhance knowledge by sampling fuzzy samples with high uncertainty for obtaining user preferences and reliable negative samples for updating recommender to achieve efficient acquisition of user preferences and model updating, and thus provide a powerful solution for CRS to deal with E&E problem. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of KGenSam with significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods.

While widely adopted in practical applications, face recognition has been critically discussed regarding the malicious use of face images and the potential privacy problems, e.g., deceiving payment system and causing personal sabotage. Online photo sharing services unintentionally act as the main repository for malicious crawler and face recognition applications. This work aims to develop a privacy-preserving solution, called Adversarial Privacy-preserving Filter (APF), to protect the online shared face images from being maliciously used.We propose an end-cloud collaborated adversarial attack solution to satisfy requirements of privacy, utility and nonaccessibility. Specifically, the solutions consist of three modules: (1) image-specific gradient generation, to extract image-specific gradient in the user end with a compressed probe model; (2) adversarial gradient transfer, to fine-tune the image-specific gradient in the server cloud; and (3) universal adversarial perturbation enhancement, to append image-independent perturbation to derive the final adversarial noise. Extensive experiments on three datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed solution. A prototype application is also released for further evaluation.We hope the end-cloud collaborated attack framework could shed light on addressing the issue of online multimedia sharing privacy-preserving issues from user side., Comment: Accepted by ACM Multimedia 2020