Canada

Transcription factors (TFs) play a fundamental role in gene regulation by selectively binding to specific DNA sequences. Understanding the nature and behavior of these TFs is essential for insights into gene regulation dynamics. In this study, we introduce a robust multi-task learning framework specifically tailored to harness both TF-specific annotations and TF-related domain annotations, thereby enhancing the accuracy of TF predictions. Notably, we incorporate cutting-edge language models that have recently garnered attention for their outstanding performance across various fields, particularly in biological computations like protein sequence modeling. Comparative experimental analysis with existing models, DeepTFactor and TFpredict, reveals that our multi-task learning framework achieves an accuracy exceeding 92% across four evaluation metrics on the TF prediction task, surpassing both competitors. Our work marks a significant leap in the domain of TF prediction, enriching our comprehension of gene regulatory mechanisms and paving the way for the discovery of novel regulatory motifs.

AAAI 2024

Enhancing Transcription Factor Prediction through Multi-Task Learning (Student Abstract) | VIDEO

tf-related domain

transcription factor

multi-task learning

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.<br><br><br><br>

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

technical paper

Conventional commonsense knowledge graph completion (CKGC) methods provide inadequate sequence when fine-tuning or generating stages and incorporate full fine-tuning, which fail to align with the autoregressive model's pre-training patterns and have insufficient parameter efficiency. Moreover, decoding through beam or greedy search produces low diversity and high similarity in generated tail entities. Hence, we resort to prefix-tuning and propose a lightweight, effective pipeline to enhance the quality and diversity of extracted commonsense knowledge. Precisely, we measure head entity similarity to yield and then concatenate top-k tuples before each target tuple for prefix-tuning the source LM, thereby improving the efficiency and speed for pretrained models; then, we design a penalty-tailored diverse beam search (p-DBS) for decoding tail entities, producing a greater quantity and diversity of generated commonsense tuples; besides, a filter strategy is utilized to filter out invalid commonsense knowledge. Through extensive automatic evaluations, including ChatGPT scoring, our method can extract diverse, novel, and accurate commonsense knowledge (CK).

Amplifying Diversity and Quality in Commonsense Knowledge Graph Completion (Student Abstract)

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have greatly transformed various downstream tasks, yet frequently display social biases from training data, raising fairness concerns. Recent efforts to debias PLMs come with limitations: they either fine-tune the entire parameters in PLMs, which is time-consuming and disregards the expressiveness of PLMs, or ignore the reintroducing biases from downstream tasks when applying debiased models to them. Hence, we propose a two-stage pipeline to mitigate biases from both internal and downstream contexts while preserving expressiveness in language models. Specifically, for the debiasing procedure, we resort to continuous prefix-tuning, not fully fine-tuning the PLM, in which we design a debiasing term for optimization and an alignment term to keep words’ relative distances and ensure the model's expressiveness. For downstream tasks, we perform causal intervention across different demographic groups for invariant predictions. Results on three GLUE tasks show our method alleviates biases from internal and downstream contexts, while keeping PLM expressiveness intact.

Biases Mitigation and Expressiveness Preservation in Language Models: A Comprehensive Pipeline (Student Abstract)

Pre-trained language models have shown their high performance of text processing in intelligent customer service platforms. However, these models do not leverage domain specific information. In this paper, we propose icsPLMs optimized for intelligent customer service on both word and sentence levels. Our experimental results represent that using targeted strategies can further improve the performance of pre-trained language models in this field.

icsPLMs: Exploring Pre-trained Language Models in Intelligent Customer Service (Student Abstract) | VIDEO

In this evolving era of machine learning security, membership inference attacks have emerged as a potent threat to the confidentiality of sensitive data. In this attack, adversaries aim to determine whether a particular point was used during the training of a target model. This paper proposes a new method to gauge a data point’s membership in a model’s training set. Instead of correlating loss with membership, as is traditionally done, we have leveraged the fact that training examples generally exhibit higher confidence values when classified into their actual class. During training, the model is essentially being ’fit’ to the training data and might face particular difficulties in generalization to unseen data. This asymmetry leads to the model achieving higher confidence on the training data as it exploits the specific patterns and noise present in the training data. Our proposed approach leverages the confidence values generated by the machine-learning model. These confidence values provide a probabilistic measure of the model’s certainty in its predictions and can further be used to infer the membership of a given data point. Additionally, we also introduce another variant of our method that allows us to carry out this attack without knowing the ground truth(true class) of a given data point, thus offering an edge over existing label-dependent attack methods.

Confidence Is All You Need for MI Attacks (Student Abstract)

Fluid resuscitation is an initial treatment frequently employed to treat shock, restore lost blood, protect tissues from injury, and prevent organ dysfunction in critically ill patients. However, it is not without risk (e.g., overly aggressive resuscitation may cause organ damage and even death). We leverage machine learning models trained to assess sufficiency of resuscitation in laboratory animals subjected to induced hemorrhage and transfer them to use with human trauma patients. Our key takeaway is that animal experiments and models can inform human healthcare, especially when human data is limited or when collecting relevant human data via potentially harmful protocols is unfeasible.

Adapting Animal Models to Assess Sufficiency of Fluid Resuscitation in Humans (Student Abstract)

Recently, the field of Speech Enhancement has witnessed the success of diffusion-based generative models. However, these diffusion-based methods used to take multiple iterations to generate high-quality samples, leading to high computational costs and inefficiency. In this paper, we propose SDFEN (Shallow Diffusion for Fast spEech eNhancement), a novel approach for addressing the inefficiency problem while enhancing the quality of generated samples by reducing the iterative steps in the reverse process of diffusion method. Specifically, we introduce the shallow diffusion strategy initiating the reverse process with an adaptive time step to accelerate inference. In addition, a dedicated noisy predictor is further proposed to guide the adaptive selection of time step. Experiment results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed SDFEN in effectiveness and efficiency.

Shallow Diffusion for Fast Speech Enhancement (Student Abstract)

Occluded person re-identification (Re-ID) aims to address the potential occlusion problem when matching occluded or holistic pedestrians from different camera views. Many methods use the background as artificial occlusion  and rely on attention networks to exclude noisy interference. However, the significant discrepancy between simple background occlusion and realistic occlusion can negatively impact the generalization of the network. To address  this issue, we propose a novel transformer-based Attention Disturbance and Dual-Path Constraint Network (ADP) to  enhance the generalization of attention networks. Firstly, to  imitate real-world obstacles, we introduce an Attention Disturbance Mask (ADM) module that generates an offensive  noise, which can distract attention like a realistic occluder,  as a more complex form of occlusion. Secondly, to fully  exploit these complex occluded images, we develop a DualPath Constraint Module (DPC) that can obtain preferable  supervision information from holistic images through dualpath interaction. With our proposed method, the network  can effectively circumvent a wide variety of occlusions using the basic ViT baseline. Comprehensive experimental  evaluations conducted on person re-ID benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of ADP over state-of-the-art methods.

Attention Disturbance and Dual-Path Constraint Network for Occluded Person Re-identification

We propose a method to learn prediction models such as classifiers for unseen target tasks where labeled and unlabeled data are absent but a few relevant input features for solving the tasks are given. Although machine learning requires data for training, data are often difficult to collect in practice. On the other hand, for many applications, a few relevant features would be more easily obtained. Although zero-shot learning or zero-shot domain adaptation use external knowledge to adapt to unseen classes or tasks without data, relevant features have not been used in existing studies. The proposed method improves the generalization performance on the target tasks, where there are no data but a few relevant features are given, by meta-learning from labeled data in related tasks. In the meta-learning phase, it is essential to simulate test phases on target tasks where prediction model learning is required without data. To this end, our neural network-based prediction model is meta-learned such that it correctly responds to perturbations of the relevant features on randomly generated synthetic data. By this modeling, the prediction model can explicitly learn the discriminability of the relevant features without real target data. When unlabeled training data are available in the target tasks, the proposed method can incorporate such data to boost the performance in a unified framework.  Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms various existing methods with four real-world datasets.

Zero-Shot Task Adaptation with Relevant Feature Information

When pre-trained models become rapidly larger, the cost of fine-tuning on downstream tasks steadily increases, too. To economically fine-tune these models, parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) is proposed, which only tunes a tiny subset of trainable parameters to efficiently learn quality representations. However, current PETL methods are facing the dilemma that during training the GPU memory footprint is not effectively reduced as trainable parameters. PETL will likely fail, too, if the full fine-tuning encounters the out-of-GPU-memory issue. This phenomenon happens because trainable parameters from these methods are generally entangled with the backbone, such that a lot of intermediate states have to be stored in GPU memory for gradient propagation. To alleviate this problem, we introduce Disentangled Transfer Learning (DTL), which disentangles the trainable parameters from the backbone using a lightweight Compact Side Network (CSN). By progressively extracting task-specific information with a few low-rank linear mappings and appropriately adding the information back to the backbone, CSN effectively realizes knowledge transfer in various downstream tasks. We conducted extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of our method. The proposed method not only reduces a large amount of GPU memory usage and trainable parameters, but also outperforms existing PETL methods by a significant margin in accuracy, achieving new state-of-the-art on several standard benchmarks.

DTL: Disentangled Transfer Learning for Visual Recognition

Online contextual reasoning and association across consecutive video frames are critical to perceive instances in visual tracking. However, most current top-performing trackers persistently lean on sparse temporal relationships between reference and search frames via an offline mode. Consequently, they can only interact independently within each image-pair and establish limited temporal correlations. To alleviate the above problem, we propose a simple, flexible and effective video-level tracking pipeline, named ODTrack, which densely associates the contextual relationships of video frames in an online token propagation manner. ODTrack receives video frames of arbitrary length to capture the spatio-temporal trajectory relationships of an instance, and compresses the discrimination features (localization information) of a target into a token sequence to achieve frame-to-frame association. This new solution brings the following benefits: 1) the purified token sequences can serve as prompts for the inference in the next video frame, whereby past information is leveraged to guide future inference; 2) the complex online update strategies are effectively avoided by the iterative propagation of token sequences, and thus we can achieve more efficient model representation and computation. ODTrack achieves a new SOTA performance on seven benchmarks, while running at real-time speed. Code and models are available at https://github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/ODTrack.

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