United States

Online insurance is a new type of e-commerce with exponential growth.
An effective recommendation model that maximizes the total revenue of insurance products listed in multiple customized sales scenarios is crucial for the success of online insurance business.
Prior recommendation models are ineffective because they fail to characterize the complex relatedness of insurance products in multiple sales scenarios and maximize the overall conversion rate rather than the total revenue.
Even worse, it is impractical to collect training data online for total revenue maximization due to the business logic of online insurance.
We propose RevMan, a Revenue-aware Multi-task Network for online insurance recommendation.
RevMan adopts an adaptive attention mechanism to allow effective feature sharing among complex insurance products and sales scenarios.
It also designs an efficient offline learning mechanism to learn the rank that maximizes the expected total revenue, by reusing training data and model for conversion rate maximization.
Extensive offline and online evaluations show that RevMan outperforms the state-of-the-art recommendation systems for e-commerce.

AAAI 2021

RevMan: Revenue-Aware Multi-Task Online Insurance Recommendation

The Inter-University Big Data Challenge (IUBDC) is a unique inquiry-driven, experiential learning program that invites students from any undergraduate or graduate program to apply their problem-solving while gaining familiarity with the fundamentals of data science. The IUBDC fosters scientific inquiry, pioneering thinking, and a solution-focused mindset to drive innovative ideas in health economics, public health, and health supply chain management.

The Sustainability Of Health Economics

National Inter-University Big Data Challenge 2022 -

Please find lead student research projects in Health Economics, such as, but not limited to:

1. Strengthening the healthcare industry against economic damage through destressing the healthcare supply chain shortages.

2. Affordable Healthcare for all, where students investigate the economics behind the delivery of quality healthcare for all.

3. The economics behind public vs private healthcare systems, which one is more sustainable, and/or how they can possibly be integrated.

4. How personal and public healthcare are affected by inflation, and how to find sustainable ways to mitigate its effects.

5. Preparing for strain on healthcare systems given the discovery of new COVID-19 variants.

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Few-Shot Learning (FSL) is essential for visual recognition. Many methods tackle this challenging problem via learning an embedding function from seen classes and transfer it to unseen classes with a few labeled instances. Researchers recently found it beneficial to incorporate task-specific feature adaptation into FSL models, which produces the most representative features for each task. However, these methods ignore the diversity of classes and apply a global transformation to the task. In this paper, we propose Global and Local Feature Adaptor (GLoFA), a unifying framework that tailors the instance representation to specific tasks by global and local feature adaptors. We claim that class-specific local transformation helps to improve the representation ability of feature adaptor.  Global masks tend to capture sketchy patterns, while local masks focus on detailed characteristics. A strategy to measure the relationship between instances adaptively based on the characteristics of both tasks and classes endow GLoFA with the ability to handle mix-grained tasks. GLoFA outperforms other methods on a heterogeneous task distribution and achieves competitive results on benchmark datasets.

Tailoring Embedding Function to Heterogeneous Few-Shot Tasks by Global and Local Feature Adaptors

In a customer service system, dialogue summarization can boost service efficiency by automatically creating summaries for long spoken dialogues in which customers and agents try to address issues about specific topics. In this work, we focus on topic-oriented dialogue summarization, which generates highly abstractive summaries that preserve the main ideas from dialogues. In spoken dialogues, abundant dialogue noise and common semantics could obscure the underlying informative content, making the general topic modeling approaches difficult to apply. In addition, for customer service, role-specific information matters and is an indispensable part of a summary. To effectively perform topic modeling on dialogues and capture multi-role information, in this work we propose a novel topic-augmented two-stage dialogue summarizer (TDS) jointly with a saliency-aware neural topic model (SATM) for topic-oriented summarization of customer service dialogues. Comprehensive studies on a real-world Chinese customer service dataset demonstrated the superiority of our method against several strong baselines.

Topic-Oriented Spoken Dialogue Summarization for Customer Service with Saliency-Aware Topic Modeling

Boundary information plays a significant role in 2D image segmentation, while usually being ignored in 3D point cloud segmentation where ambiguous features might be generated in feature extraction, leading to misclassification in the transition area between two objects. In this paper, firstly, we propose a Boundary Prediction Module (BPM) to predict boundary points. Based on the predicted boundary, a boundary-aware Geometric Encoding Module (GEM) is designed to encode geometric information and aggregate features with discrimination in a neighborhood, so that the local features belonging to different categories will not be polluted by each other. To provide extra geometric information for boundary-aware GEM, we also propose a light-weight Geometric Convolution Operation (GCO), making the extracted features more distinguishing. Built upon the boundary-aware GEM, we build our network and test it on benchmarks like ScanNet v2, S3DIS. Results show our methods can significantly improve the baseline and achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Boundary-Aware Geometric Encoding for Semantic Segmentation of Point Clouds

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) refers to the problem of learning to classify instances from novel classes (unseen) that are absent in the training set (seen). Most ZSL methods infer the correlation between visual features and attributes to train the classifier for unseen classes. They may have a strong bias towards seen classes during training. Meta-learning has been introduced to mitigate the basis, but meta-ZSL methods are inapplicable when tasks used for training are sampled from diverse distributions. In this regard, we propose a novel Task-aligned Generative Meta-learning model for Zero-shot learning (TGMZ), aiming to mitigate the potentially biased training and to enable meta-ZSL to accommodate real-world datasets that contain diverse distributions. Specifically, TGMZ incorporates an attribute-conditioned task-wise distribution alignment network that projects tasks into a unified distribution to deliver an unbiased model. Our experiments show TGMZ achieves a relative improvement of 2.1%, 3.0%, 2.5%, and 7.6% over state-of-the-art algorithms on AWA1, AWA2, CUB, and aPY datasets, respectively. Overall, TGMZ outperforms competitors by 3.6% in the generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) setting and 7.9% in our proposed fusion-ZSL setting.

Task Aligned Generative Meta-Learning for Zero-Shot Learning

Shared on-demand mobility holds immense potential for urban transportation. However, finding ride matches in real-time at urban scale is a very difficult combinatorial optimization problem and mostly heuristic approaches are applied. In this work, we introduce a principled approach to this combinatorial problem. Our approach proceeds by constructing suitable representations for rides and driver routes capturing their essential spatio-temporal aspects in an appropriate vector space, and defining a similarity metric in this space that expresses matching utility. This then lets us mathematically model the problem of finding ride matches as that of Near Neighbor Search (NNS). Exploiting this modeling, we devise a novel spatio-temporal search algorithm for finding ride matches based on the theory of Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH). Apart from being highly efficient, our algorithm enjoys several practically useful properties and extension possibilities. Experiments with large real-world datasets show that our algorithm consistently outperforms state-of-the-art heuristic methods thereby proving its practical applicability.

When Hashing Met Matching: Efficient Spatio-Temporal Search for Ridesharing

Semi-supervised variational autoencoders (VAEs) have obtained strong results, but have also encountered the challenge that good ELBO values do not always imply accurate inference results.In this paper, we investigate and propose two causes of this problem: (1) The ELBO objective cannot utilize the label information directly. (2) A bottleneck value exists, and continuing to optimize ELBO after this value will not improve inference accuracy. On the basis of the experiment results, we propose SHOT-VAE to address these problems without introducing additional prior knowledge. The SHOT-VAE offers two contributions: (1) A new ELBO approximation named smooth-ELBO that integrates the label predictive loss into ELBO. (2) An approximation based on optimal interpolation that breaks the ELBO value bottleneck by reducing the margin between ELBO and the data likelihood. The SHOT-VAE achieves good performance with 25.30% error rate on CIFAR-100 with 10k labels and reduces the error rate to 6.11% on CIFAR-10 with 4k labels.

SHOT-VAE: Semi-Supervised Deep Generative Models with Label-Aware ELBO Approximations

Chest X-rays are an important and accessible clinical imaging tool for the detection of many thoracic diseases. Over the past decade, deep learning, with a focus on the convolutional neural network (CNN), has become the most powerful computer-aided diagnosis technology for improving disease identification performance. However, training an effective and robust deep CNN usually requires a large amount of data with high annotation quality. For chest X-ray imaging, annotating large-scale data requires professional domain knowledge and is time-consuming. Thus, existing public chest X-ray datasets usually adopt language pattern based methods to automatically mine labels from reports. However, this results in label uncertainty and inconsistency. In this paper, we propose many-to-one distribution learning (MODL) and K-nearest neighbor smoothing (KNNS) methods from two perspectives to improve a single model's disease identification performance, rather than focusing on an ensemble of models. MODL integrates multiple models to obtain a soft label distribution for optimizing the single target model, which can reduce the effects of original label uncertainty. Moreover, KNNS aims to enhance the robustness of the target model to provide consistent predictions on images with similar medical findings. Extensive experiments on the public NIH Chest X-ray and CheXpert datasets show that our model achieves consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.

Many-to-One Distribution Learning and K-Nearest Neighbor Smoothing for Thoracic Disease Identification

Online hashing for streaming data has attracted increasing attention recently. However, most existing algorithms focus on batch inputs and instance-balanced optimization, which is limited in the single datum input case and does not match the dynamic training in online hashing. Furthermore, constantly updating the online model with new-coming samples will inevitably lead to the catastrophic forgetting problem. In this paper, we propose a novel online hashing method to handle the above-mentioned issues jointly, termed Asynchronus Teacher-Guided Bit-wise Hard Mining for Online Hashing. Firstly, to meet the needs of datum-wise online hashing, we design a novel binary codebook that is discriminative to separate different classes. Secondly, we propose a novel semantic loss (termed bit-wise attention loss) to dynamically focus on hard samples of each bit during training. Last but not least, we design a asynchronous knowledge distillation scheme to alleviate the catastrophic forgetting problem, where the teacher model is delaying updated to maintain the old knowledge, guiding the student model learning. Extensive experiments conducted on two public benchmarks demonstrate the favorable performance of our method over the state-of-the-arts.

Asynchronous Teacher Guided Bit-wise Hard Mining for Online Hashing

Vertical federated learning (VFL) attracts increasing attention due to the emerging demands of multi-party collaborative modeling and concerns of privacy leakage. In the real VFL applications, usually only one or partial parties hold labels, which makes it challenging for all parties to collaboratively learn the model without privacy leakage. Meanwhile, most existing VFL algorithms are trapped in the synchronous computations, which leads to inefficiency in their real-world applications. To address these challenging problems, we propose a novel VFL framework integrated with new backward updating mechanism and bilevel asynchronous parallel architecture (VFB^2), under which three new algorithms, including VFB^2-SGD, -SVRG, and -SAGA, are proposed. We derive the theoretical results of the convergence rates of these three algorithms under both strongly convex and nonconvex conditions. We also prove the security of VFB^2 under semi-honest threat models. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our algorithms are efficient, scalable, and lossless.

Secure Bilevel Asynchronous Vertical Federated Learning with Backward Updating

Feature interactions are essential for achieving high accuracy in recommender systems. Many studies take into account the interaction between every pair of features. However, this is suboptimal because some feature interactions may not be that relevant to the recommendation result and taking them into account may introduce noise and decrease recommendation accuracy. To make the best out of feature interactions, we propose a graph neural network approach to effectively model them, together with a novel technique to automatically detect those feature interactions that are beneficial in terms of recommendation accuracy. The automatic feature interaction detection is achieved via edge prediction with an L0 activation regularization. Our proposed model is proved to be effective through the information bottleneck principle and statistical interaction theory. Experimental results show that our model (i) outperforms existing baselines in terms of accuracy, and (ii) automatically identifies beneficial feature interactions.

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Tailoring Embedding Function to Heterogeneous Few-Shot Tasks by Global and Local Feature Adaptors

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Next from AAAI 2021

Tailoring Embedding Function to Heterogeneous Few-Shot Tasks by Global and Local Feature Adaptors

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