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Pioneer researches recognize evidences as crucial elements in fake news detection apart from patterns. Existing evidence-aware methods either require laborious pre-processing procedures to assure relevant and high-quality evidence data, or incorporate the entire spectrum of available evidences in all news cases, regardless of the quality and quantity of the retrieved data. In this paper, we propose an approach named \textbf{SEE} that retrieves useful information from web-searched annotation-free evidences with an early-termination mechanism. The proposed SEE is constructed by three main phases: \textbf{S}earching online materials using the news as a query and directly using their titles as evidences without any annotating or filtering procedure, sequentially \textbf{E}xamining the news alongside with each piece of evidence via attention mechanisms to produce new hidden states with retrieved information, and allowing \textbf{E}arly-termination within the examining loop by assessing whether there is adequate confidence for producing a correct prediction. We have conducted extensive experiments on datasets with unprocessed evidences, i.e., Weibo21, GossipCop, and pre-processed evidences, namely Snopes and PolitiFact. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches., Comment: ECAI 2024 paper. Fudan University & NVIDIA. To appear

This paper reviews and summarizes the research results on fact-based fake news from the perspectives of tasks and problems, algorithm strategies, and datasets. First, the paper systematically explains the task definition and core problems of fact-based fake news detection. Second, the paper summarizes the existing detection methods based on the algorithm principles. Third, the paper analyzes the classic and newly proposed datasets in the field, and summarizes the experimental results on each dataset. Finally, the paper summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of existing methods, proposes several challenges that methods in this field may face, and looks forward to the next stage of research. It is hoped that this paper will provide reference for subsequent work in the field., Comment: Invited short review paper (in Chinese)

The easy sharing of multimedia content on social media has caused a rapid dissemination of fake news, which threatens society's stability and security. Therefore, fake news detection has garnered extensive research interest in the field of social forensics. Current methods primarily concentrate on the integration of textual and visual features but fail to effectively exploit multi-modal information at both fine-grained and coarse-grained levels. Furthermore, they suffer from an ambiguity problem due to a lack of correlation between modalities or a contradiction between the decisions made by each modality. To overcome these challenges, we present a Multi-grained Multi-modal Fusion Network (MMFN) for fake news detection. Inspired by the multi-grained process of human assessment of news authenticity, we respectively employ two Transformer-based pre-trained models to encode token-level features from text and images. The multi-modal module fuses fine-grained features, taking into account coarse-grained features encoded by the CLIP encoder. To address the ambiguity problem, we design uni-modal branches with similarity-based weighting to adaptively adjust the use of multi-modal features. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three prevalent datasets., Comment: Accepted by ICMR 2023

Videos are prone to tampering attacks that alter the meaning and deceive the audience. Previous video forgery detection schemes find tiny clues to locate the tampered areas. However, attackers can successfully evade supervision by destroying such clues using video compression or blurring. This paper proposes a video watermarking network for tampering localization. We jointly train a 3D-UNet-based watermark embedding network and a decoder that predicts the tampering mask. The perturbation made by watermark embedding is close to imperceptible. Considering that there is no off-the-shelf differentiable video codec simulator, we propose to mimic video compression by ensembling simulation results of other typical attacks, e.g., JPEG compression and blurring, as an approximation. Experimental results demonstrate that our method generates watermarked videos with good imperceptibility and robustly and accurately locates tampered areas within the attacked version., Comment: Submitted to MMSP 2022

Previous researches on multimedia fake news detection include a series of complex feature extraction and fusion networks to gather useful information from the news. However, how cross-modal consistency relates to the fidelity of news and how features from different modalities affect the decision-making are still open questions. This paper presents a novel scheme of Bootstrapping Multi-view Representations (BMR) for fake news detection. Given a multi-modal news, we extract representations respectively from the views of the text, the image pattern and the image semantics. Improved Multi-gate Mixture-of-Expert networks (iMMoE) are proposed for feature refinement and fusion. Representations from each view are separately used to coarsely predict the fidelity of the whole news, and the multimodal representations are able to predict the cross-modal consistency. With the prediction scores, we reweigh each view of the representations and bootstrap them for fake news detection. Extensive experiments conducted on typical fake news detection datasets prove that the proposed BMR outperforms state-of-the-art schemes., Comment: Authors are from Fudan University, China. Under Review

Multimodal fake news detection has attracted many research interests in social forensics. Many existing approaches introduce tailored attention mechanisms to guide the fusion of unimodal features. However, how the similarity of these features is calculated and how it will affect the decision-making process in FND are still open questions. Besides, the potential of pretrained multi-modal feature learning models in fake news detection has not been well exploited. This paper proposes a FND-CLIP framework, i.e., a multimodal Fake News Detection network based on Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP). Given a targeted multimodal news, we extract the deep representations from the image and text using a ResNet-based encoder, a BERT-based encoder and two pair-wise CLIP encoders. The multimodal feature is a concatenation of the CLIP-generated features weighted by the standardized cross-modal similarity of the two modalities. The extracted features are further processed for redundancy reduction before feeding them into the final classifier. We introduce a modality-wise attention module to adaptively reweight and aggregate the features. We have conducted extensive experiments on typical fake news datasets. The results indicate that the proposed framework has a better capability in mining crucial features for fake news detection. The proposed FND-CLIP can achieve better performances than previous works, i.e., 0.7\%, 6.8\% and 1.3\% improvements in overall accuracy on Weibo, Politifact and Gossipcop, respectively. Besides, we justify that CLIP-based learning can allow better flexibility on multimodal feature selection., Comment: Submitted to CIKM 2022

Finding an optimal set of critical nodes in a complex network has been a long-standing problem in the fields of both artificial intelligence and operations research. Potential applications include epidemic control, network security, carbon emission monitoring, emergence response, drug design, and vulnerability assessment. In this work, we consider the problem of finding a minimal node separator whose removal separates a graph into multiple different connected components with fewer than a limited number of vertices in each component. To solve it, we propose a frequent itemset-driven search approach, which integrates the concept of frequent itemset mining in data mining into the well-known memetic search framework. Starting from a high-quality population built by the solution construction and population repair procedures, it iteratively employs the frequent itemset recombination operator (to generate promising offspring solution based on itemsets that frequently occur in high-quality solutions), tabu search-based simulated annealing (to find high-quality local optima), population repair procedure (to modify the population), and rank-based population management strategy (to guarantee a healthy population). Extensive evaluations on 50 widely used benchmark instances show that it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms. In particular, it discovers 29 new upper bounds and matches 18 previous best-known bounds. Finally, experimental analyses are performed to confirm the effectiveness of key algorithmic modules of the proposed method., Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures

Rank aggregation aims to combine the preference rankings of a number of alternatives from different voters into a single consensus ranking. As a useful model for a variety of practical applications, however, it is a computationally challenging problem. In this paper, we propose an effective hybrid evolutionary ranking algorithm to solve the rank aggregation problem with both complete and partial rankings. The algorithm features a semantic crossover based on concordant pairs and a late acceptance local search reinforced by an efficient incremental evaluation technique. Experiments are conducted to assess the algorithm, indicating a highly competitive performance on benchmark instances compared with state-of-the-art algorithms. To demonstrate its practical usefulness, the algorithm is applied to label ranking, which is an important machine learning task., Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures

Detecting critical nodes in sparse graphs is important in a variety of application domains, such as network vulnerability assessment, epidemic control, and drug design. The critical node problem (CNP) aims to find a set of critical nodes from a network whose deletion maximally degrades the pairwise connectivity of the residual network. Due to its general NP-hard nature, state-of-the-art CNP solutions are based on heuristic approaches. Domain knowledge and trial-and-error are usually required when designing such approaches, thus consuming considerable effort and time. This work proposes a feature importance-aware graph attention network for node representation and combines it with dueling double deep Q-network to create an end-to-end algorithm to solve CNP for the first time. It does not need any problem-specific knowledge or labeled datasets as required by most of existing methods. Once the model is trained, it can be generalized to cope with various types of CNPs (with different sizes and topological structures) without re-training. Computational experiments on 28 real-world networks show that the proposed method is highly comparable to state-of-the-art methods. It does not require any problem-specific knowledge and, hence, can be applicable to many applications including those impossible ones by using the existing approaches. It can be combined with some local search methods to further improve its solution quality. Extensive comparison results are given to show its effectiveness in solving CNP., Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures. It has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering

Clinical Named Entity Recognition (CNER) aims to automatically identity clinical terminologies in Electronic Health Records (EHRs), which is a fundamental and crucial step for clinical research. To train a high-performance model for CNER, it usually requires a large number of EHRs with high-quality labels. However, labeling EHRs, especially Chinese EHRs, is time-consuming and expensive. One effective solution to this is active learning, where a model asks labelers to annotate data which the model is uncertain of. Conventional active learning assumes a single labeler that always replies noiseless answers to queried labels. However, in real settings, multiple labelers provide diverse quality of annotation with varied costs and labelers with low overall annotation quality can still assign correct labels for some specific instances. In this paper, we propose a Cost-Quality Adaptive Active Learning (CQAAL) approach for CNER in Chinese EHRs, which maintains a balance between the annotation quality, labeling costs, and the informativeness of selected instances. Specifically, CQAAL selects cost-effective instance-labeler pairs to achieve better annotation quality with lower costs in an adaptive manner. Computational results on the CCKS-2017 Task 2 benchmark dataset demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of the proposed CQAAL., Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures

Population-based memetic algorithms have been successfully applied to solve many difficult combinatorial problems. Often, a population of fixed size was used in such algorithms to record some best solutions sampled during the search. However, given the particular features of the problem instance under consideration, a population of variable size would be more suitable to ensure the best search performance possible. In this work, we propose variable population memetic search (VPMS), where a strategic population sizing mechanism is used to dynamically adjust the population size during the memetic search process. Our VPMS approach starts its search from a small population of only two solutions to focus on exploitation, and then adapts the population size according to the search status to continuously influence the balancing between exploitation and exploration. We illustrate an application of the VPMS approach to solve the challenging critical node problem (CNP). We show that the VPMS algorithm integrating a variable population, an effective local optimization procedure (called diversified late acceptance search) and a backbone-based crossover operator performs very well compared to state-of-the-art CNP algorithms. The algorithm is able to discover new upper bounds for 13 instances out of the 42 popular benchmark instances, while matching 23 previous best-known upper bounds.

Enriching existing medical terminology knowledge bases (KBs) is an important and never-ending work for clinical research because new terminology alias may be continually added and standard terminologies may be newly renamed. In this paper, we propose a novel automatic terminology enriching approach to supplement a set of terminologies to KBs. Specifically, terminology and entity characters are first fed into pre-trained language model to obtain semantic embedding. The pre-trained model is used again to initialize the terminology and entity representations, then they are further embedded through graph convolutional network to gain structure embedding. Afterwards, both semantic and structure embeddings are combined to measure the relevancy between the terminology and the entity. Finally, the optimal alignment is achieved based on the order of relevancy between the terminology and all the entities in the KB. Experimental results on clinical indicator terminology KB, collected from 38 top-class hospitals of Shanghai Hospital Development Center, show that our proposed approach outperforms baseline methods and can effectively enrich the KB., Comment: 8 pages, submitted to BIBM 2019

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) in hospital information systems contain patients' diagnosis and treatments, so EHRs are essential to clinical data mining. Of all the tasks in the mining process, Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) is a fundamental and important one, and most state-of-the-art methods greatly rely on large-scale of manually-annotated data. Since annotation is time-consuming and expensive, efforts have been devoted to techniques, such as active learning, to locate the most informative samples for modeling. In this paper, we follow the trend and present an active learning method for CWS in EHRs. Specically, a new sampling strategy combining Normalized Entropy with Loss Prediction (NE-LP) is proposed to select the most representative data. Meanwhile, to minimize the computational cost of learning, we propose a joint model including a word segmenter and a loss prediction model. Furthermore, to capture interactions between adjacent characters, bigram features are also applied in the joint model. To illustrate the effectiveness of NE-LP, we conducted experiments on EHRs collected from the Shuguang Hospital Affiliated to Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. The results demonstrate that NE-LP consistently outperforms conventional uncertainty-based sampling strategies for active learning in CWS., Comment: submitted to Neural Computing and Applications

Entity and relation extraction is the necessary step in structuring medical text. However, the feature extraction ability of the bidirectional long short term memory network in the existing model does not achieve the best effect. At the same time, the language model has achieved excellent results in more and more natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we present a focused attention model for the joint entity and relation extraction task. Our model integrates well-known BERT language model into joint learning through dynamic range attention mechanism, thus improving the feature representation ability of shared parameter layer. Experimental results on coronary angiography texts collected from Shuguang Hospital show that the F1-score of named entity recognition and relation classification tasks reach 96.89% and 88.51%, which are better than state-of-the-art methods 1.65% and 1.22%, respectively., Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, submitted to BIBM 2019, accepted as a regular paper

Electronic health record is an important source for clinical researches and applications, and errors inevitably occur in the data, which could lead to severe damages to both patients and hospital services. One of such error is the mismatches between diagnoses and prescriptions, which we address as 'medication anomaly' in the paper, and clinicians used to manually identify and correct them. With the development of machine learning techniques, researchers are able to train specific model for the task, but the process still requires expert knowledge to construct proper features, and few semantic relations are considered. In this paper, we propose a simple, yet effective detection method that tackles the problem by detecting the semantic inconsistency between diagnoses and prescriptions. Unlike traditional outlier or anomaly detection, the scheme uses continuous bag of words to construct the semantic connection between specific central words and their surrounding context. The detection of medication anomaly is transformed into identifying the least possible central word based on given context. To help distinguish the anomaly from normal context, we also incorporate a ranking accumulation strategy. The experiments were conducted on two real hospital electronic medical records, and the topN accuracy of the proposed method increased by 3.91 to 10.91% and 0.68 to 2.13% on the datasets, respectively, which is highly competitive to other traditional machine learning-based approaches., Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, submitted to BIBM 2019, accepted in workshop BHI 2019

Clinical text structuring is a critical and fundamental task for clinical research. Traditional methods such as taskspecific end-to-end models and pipeline models usually suffer from the lack of dataset and error propagation. In this paper, we present a question answering based clinical text structuring (QA-CTS) task to unify different specific tasks and make dataset shareable. A novel model that aims to introduce domain-specific features (e.g., clinical named entity information) into pre-trained language model is also proposed for QA-CTS task. Experimental results on Chinese pathology reports collected from Ruijing Hospital demonstrate our presented QA-CTS task is very effective to improve the performance on specific tasks. Our proposed model also competes favorably with strong baseline models in specific tasks.

Medical activities, such as diagnoses, medicine treatments, and laboratory tests, as well as temporal relations between these activities are the basic concepts in clinical research. However, existing relational data model on electronic medical records (EMRs) lacks explicit and accurate semantic definitions of these concepts. It leads to the inconvenience of query construction and the inefficiency of query execution where multi-table join queries are frequently required. In this paper, we propose a patient event graph (PatientEG) model to capture the characteristics of EMRs. We respectively define five types of medical entities, five types of medical events and five types of temporal relations. Based on the proposed model, we also construct a PatientEG dataset with 191,294 events, 3,429 distinct entities, and 545,993 temporal relations using EMRs from Shanghai Shuguang hospital. To help to normalize entity values which contain synonyms, hyponymies, and abbreviations, we link them with the Chinese biomedical knowledge graph. With the help of PatientEG dataset, we are able to conveniently perform complex queries for clinical research such as auxiliary diagnosis and therapeutic effectiveness analysis. In addition, we provide a SPARQL endpoint to access PatientEG dataset and the dataset is also publicly available online. Also, we list several illustrative SPARQL queries on our website.

Clinical Named Entity Recognition (CNER) aims to identify and classify clinical terms such as diseases, symptoms, treatments, exams, and body parts in electronic health records, which is a fundamental and crucial task for clinical and translation research. In recent years, deep learning methods have achieved significant success in CNER tasks. However, these methods depend greatly on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), which maintain a vector of hidden activations that are propagated through time, thus causing too much time to train models. In this paper, we propose a Residual Dilated Convolutional Neural Network with Conditional Random Field (RD-CNN-CRF) to solve it. Specifically, Chinese characters and dictionary features are first projected into dense vector representations, then they are fed into the residual dilated convolutional neural network to capture contextual features. Finally, a conditional random field is employed to capture dependencies between neighboring tags. Computational results on the CCKS-2017 Task 2 benchmark dataset show that our proposed RD-CNN-CRF method competes favorably with state-of-the-art RNN-based methods both in terms of computational performance and training time., Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures. Accepted as regular paper by 2018 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1804.05017

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is one of the leading causes of cardiovascular disease deaths. CAD condition progresses rapidly, if not diagnosed and treated at an early stage may eventually lead to an irreversible state of the heart muscle death. Invasive coronary arteriography is the gold standard technique for CAD diagnosis. Coronary arteriography texts describe which part has stenosis and how much stenosis is in details. It is crucial to conduct the severity classification of CAD. In this paper, we employ a recurrent capsule network (RCN) to extract semantic relations between clinical named entities in Chinese coronary arteriography texts, through which we can automatically find out the maximal stenosis for each lumen to inference how severe CAD is according to the improved method of Gensini. Experimental results on the corpus collected from Shanghai Shuguang Hospital show that our proposed method achieves an accuracy of 97.0\% in the severity classification of CAD., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures

Named entities are usually composable and extensible. Typical examples are names of symptoms and diseases in medical areas. To distinguish these entities from general entities, we name them \textit{compound entities}. In this paper, we present an attention-based Bi-GRU-CapsNet model to detect hypernymy relationship between compound entities. Our model consists of several important components. To avoid the out-of-vocabulary problem, English words or Chinese characters in compound entities are fed into the bidirectional gated recurrent units. An attention mechanism is designed to focus on the differences between the two compound entities. Since there are some different cases in hypernymy relationship between compound entities, capsule network is finally employed to decide whether the hypernymy relationship exists or not. Experimental results demonstrate, Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. Accepted as short paper by 2018 International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine

Clinical Named Entity Recognition (CNER) aims to identify and classify clinical terms such as diseases, symptoms, treatments, exams, and body parts in electronic health records, which is a fundamental and crucial task for clinical and translational research. In recent years, deep neural networks have achieved significant success in named entity recognition and many other Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Most of these algorithms are trained end to end, and can automatically learn features from large scale labeled datasets. However, these data-driven methods typically lack the capability of processing rare or unseen entities. Previous statistical methods and feature engineering practice have demonstrated that human knowledge can provide valuable information for handling rare and unseen cases. In this paper, we address the problem by incorporating dictionaries into deep neural networks for the Chinese CNER task. Two different architectures that extend the Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) neural network and five different feature representation schemes are proposed to handle the task. Computational results on the CCKS-2017 Task 2 benchmark dataset show that the proposed method achieves the highly competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-art deep learning methods., Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures

This paper presents a hybrid approach called frequent pattern based search that combines data mining and optimization. The proposed method uses a data mining procedure to mine frequent patterns from a set of high-quality solutions collected from previous search, and the mined frequent patterns are then employed to build starting solutions that are improved by an optimization procedure. After presenting the general approach and its composing ingredients, we illustrate its application to solve the well-known and challenging quadratic assignment problem. Computational results on the 21 hardest benchmark instances show that the proposed approach competes favorably with state-of-the-art algorithms both in terms of solution quality and computing time.

Critical node problems involve identifying a subset of critical nodes from an undirected graph whose removal results in optimizing a pre-defined measure over the residual graph. As useful models for a variety of practical applications, these problems are computational challenging. In this paper, we study the classic critical node problem (CNP) and introduce an effective memetic algorithm for solving CNP. The proposed algorithm combines a double backbone-based crossover operator (to generate promising offspring solutions), a component-based neighborhood search procedure (to find high-quality local optima) and a rank-based pool updating strategy (to guarantee a healthy population). Specially, the component-based neighborhood search integrates two key techniques, i.e., two-phase node exchange strategy and node weighting scheme. The double backbone-based crossover extends the idea of general backbone-based crossovers. Extensive evaluations on 42 synthetic and real-world benchmark instances show that the proposed algorithm discovers 21 new upper bounds and matches 18 previous best-known upper bounds. We also demonstrate the relevance of our algorithm for effectively solving a variant of the classic CNP, called the cardinality-constrained critical node problem. Finally, we investigate the usefulness of each key algorithmic component.

Label ranking aims to learn a mapping from instances to rankings over a finite number of predefined labels. Random forest is a powerful and one of the most successful general-purpose machine learning algorithms of modern times. In this paper, we present a powerful random forest label ranking method which uses random decision trees to retrieve nearest neighbors. We have developed a novel two-step rank aggregation strategy to effectively aggregate neighboring rankings discovered by the random forest into a final predicted ranking. Compared with existing methods, the new random forest method has many advantages including its intrinsically scalable tree data structure, highly parallel-able computational architecture and much superior performance. We present extensive experimental results to demonstrate that our new method achieves the highly competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods for datasets with complete ranking and datasets with only partial ranking information., Comment: 28 pages, 4 figures,accepted to Expert Systems With Applications in June 2018

Given a set of $n$ elements separated by a pairwise distance matrix, the minimum differential dispersion problem (Min-Diff DP) aims to identify a subset of m elements (m < n) such that the difference between the maximum sum and the minimum sum of the inter-element distances between any two chosen elements is minimized. We propose an effective iterated local search (denoted by ILS_MinDiff) for Min-Diff DP. To ensure an effective exploration and exploitation of the search space, the proposed ILS_MinDiff algorithm iterates through three sequential search phases: a fast descent-based neighborhood search phase to find a local optimum from a given starting solution, a local optima exploring phase to visit nearby high-quality solutions around a given local optimum, and a local optima escaping phase to move away from the current search region. Experimental results on six data sets of 190 benchmark instances demonstrate that ILS_MinDiff competes favorably with the state-of-the-art algorithms by finding 130 improved best results (new upper bounds).

Grouping problems aim to partition a set of items into multiple mutually disjoint subsets according to some specific criterion and constraints. Grouping problems cover a large class of important combinatorial optimization problems that are generally computationally difficult. In this paper, we propose a general solution approach for grouping problems, i.e., reinforcement learning based local search (RLS), which combines reinforcement learning techniques with descent-based local search. The viability of the proposed approach is verified on a well-known representative grouping problem (graph coloring) where a very simple descent-based coloring algorithm is applied. Experimental studies on popular DIMACS and COLOR02 benchmark graphs indicate that RLS achieves competitive performances compared to a number of well-known coloring algorithms.