We present Banyan, an improved model to learn semantic representations by inducing explicit structure over data. In contrast to prior approaches using structure spanning single sentences, Banyan learns by resolving multiple constituent structures into a shared one explicitly incorporating global context. Combined with an improved message-passing scheme inspired by Griffin, Banyan learns significantly better representations, avoids spurious false negatives with contrastive learning, and drastically improves memory efficiency in such explicit-structured models. Using the Self-StrAE framework, we show that Banyan (a) outperforms baselines using sentential structure across various settings (b) matches or outperforms unstructured baselines like GloVe (+augmentations) and a RoBERTa medium (+simcse) pre-trained on 100M tokens, despite having just a handful of (non-embedding) parameters, and (c) also learns effective representations across several low resource (Asian and African) languages as measured on SemRel tasks.

State-space models (SSMs) have garnered attention for effectively processing long data sequences, reducing the need to segment time series into shorter intervals for model training and inference. Traditionally, SSMs capture only the temporal dynamics of time series data, omitting the equally critical spectral features. This study introduces EEG-SSM, a novel state-space model-based approach for dementia classification using EEG data. Our model features two primary innovations: EEG-SSM temporal and EEG-SSM spectral components. The temporal component is designed to efficiently process EEG sequences of varying lengths, while the spectral component enhances the model by integrating frequency-domain information from EEG signals. The synergy of these components allows EEG-SSM to adeptly manage the complexities of multivariate EEG data, significantly improving accuracy and stability across different temporal resolutions. Demonstrating a remarkable 91.0 percent accuracy in classifying Healthy Control (HC), Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD), and Alzheimer's Disease (AD) groups, EEG-SSM outperforms existing models on the same dataset. The development of EEG-SSM represents an improvement in the use of state-space models for screening dementia, offering more precise and cost-effective tools for clinical neuroscience.

Different prediction models might perform equally well (Rashomon set) in the same task, but offer conflicting interpretations and conclusions about the data. The Rashomon effect in the context of Explainable AI (XAI) has been recognized as a critical factor. Although the Rashomon set has been introduced and studied in various contexts, its practical application is at its infancy stage and lacks adequate guidance and evaluation. We study the problem of the Rashomon set sampling from a practical viewpoint and identify two fundamental axioms - generalizability and implementation sparsity that exploring methods ought to satisfy in practical usage. These two axioms are not satisfied by most known attribution methods, which we consider to be a fundamental weakness. We use the norms to guide the design of an $\epsilon$-subgradient-based sampling method. We apply this method to a fundamental mathematical problem as a proof of concept and to a set of practical datasets to demonstrate its ability compared with existing sampling methods.

In this work, we introduce several schemes to leverage description-augmented embedding similarity for dataless intent classification using current state-of-the-art (SOTA) text embedding models. We report results of our methods on four commonly used intent classification datasets and compare against previous works of a similar nature. Our work shows promising results for dataless classification scaling to a large number of unseen intents. We show competitive results and significant improvements (+6.12\% Avg.) over strong zero-shot baselines, all without training on labelled or task-specific data. Furthermore, we provide qualitative error analysis of the shortfalls of this methodology to help guide future research in this area.

It is challenging to scale time series forecasting models such that they forecast accurately for multiple distinct domains and datasets, all with potentially different underlying collection procedures (e.g., sample resolution), patterns (e.g., periodicity), and prediction requirements (e.g., reconstruction vs. forecasting). We call this general task universal forecasting. Existing methods usually assume that input data is regularly sampled, and they forecast to pre-determined horizons, resulting in failure to generalise outside of the scope of their training. We propose the DAM - a neural model that takes randomly sampled histories and outputs an adjustable basis composition as a continuous function of time for forecasting to non-fixed horizons. It involves three key components: (1) a flexible approach for using randomly sampled histories from a long-tail distribution, that enables an efficient global perspective of the underlying temporal dynamics while retaining focus on the recent history; (2) a transformer backbone that is trained on these actively sampled histories to produce, as representational output, (3) the basis coefficients of a continuous function of time. We show that a single univariate DAM, trained on 25 time series datasets, either outperformed or closely matched existing SoTA models at multivariate long-term forecasting across 18 datasets, including 8 held-out for zero-shot transfer, even though these models were trained to specialise for each dataset-horizon combination. This single DAM excels at zero-shot transfer and very-long-term forecasting, performs well at imputation, is interpretable via basis function composition and attention, can be tuned for different inference-cost requirements, is robust to missing and irregularly sampled data {by design}.

Environmental monitoring of lakeside green areas is crucial for environmental protection. Compared to manual inspections, computer vision technologies offer a more efficient solution when deployed on-site. Multispectral imaging provides diverse information about objects under different spectrums, aiding in the differentiation between waste and lakeside lawn environments. This study introduces WasteMS, the first multispectral dataset established for the semantic segmentation of lakeside waste. WasteMS includes a diverse range of waste types in lawn environments, captured under various lighting conditions. We implemented a rigorous annotation process to label waste in images. Representative semantic segmentation frameworks were used to evaluate segmentation accuracy using WasteMS. Challenges encountered when using WasteMS for segmenting waste on lakeside lawns were discussed. The WasteMS dataset is available at https://github.com/zhuqinfeng1999/WasteMS.

Business process management (BPM) has been widely used to discover, model, analyze, and optimize organizational processes. BPM looks at these processes with analysis techniques that assume a clearly defined start and end. However, not all processes adhere to this logic, with the consequence that their behavior cannot be appropriately captured by BPM analysis techniques. This paper addresses this research problem at a conceptual level. More specifically, we introduce the notion of vitalizing business processes that target the lifecycle process of one or more entities. We show the existence of lifecycle processes in many industries and that their appropriate conceptualizations pave the way for the definition of suitable modeling and analysis techniques. This paper provides a set of requirements for their analysis, and a conceptualization of lifecycle and vitalizing processes.

Diffusion models revolutionize image generation by leveraging natural language to guide the creation of multimedia content. Despite significant advancements in such generative models, challenges persist in depicting detailed human-object interactions, especially regarding pose and object placement accuracy. We introduce a training-free method named Reasoning and Correcting Diffusion (ReCorD) to address these challenges. Our model couples Latent Diffusion Models with Visual Language Models to refine the generation process, ensuring precise depictions of HOIs. We propose an interaction-aware reasoning module to improve the interpretation of the interaction, along with an interaction correcting module to refine the output image for more precise HOI generation delicately. Through a meticulous process of pose selection and object positioning, ReCorD achieves superior fidelity in generated images while efficiently reducing computational requirements. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three benchmarks to demonstrate the significant progress in solving text-to-image generation tasks, showcasing ReCorD's ability to render complex interactions accurately by outperforming existing methods in HOI classification score, as well as FID and Verb CLIP-Score. Project website is available at https://alberthkyhky.github.io/ReCorD/ .

In this paper, we argue that similarity-based privacy metrics cannot ensure regulatory compliance of synthetic data. Our analysis and counter-examples show that they do not protect against singling out and linkability and, among other fundamental issues, completely ignore the motivated intruder test.

Accurately and promptly predicting accidents among surrounding traffic agents from camera footage is crucial for the safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs). This task presents substantial challenges stemming from the unpredictable nature of traffic accidents, their long-tail distribution, the intricacies of traffic scene dynamics, and the inherently constrained field of vision of onboard cameras. To address these challenges, this study introduces a novel accident anticipation framework for AVs, termed CRASH. It seamlessly integrates five components: object detector, feature extractor, object-aware module, context-aware module, and multi-layer fusion. Specifically, we develop the object-aware module to prioritize high-risk objects in complex and ambiguous environments by calculating the spatial-temporal relationships between traffic agents. In parallel, the context-aware is also devised to extend global visual information from the temporal to the frequency domain using the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and capture fine-grained visual features of potential objects and broader context cues within traffic scenes. To capture a wider range of visual cues, we further propose a multi-layer fusion that dynamically computes the temporal dependencies between different scenes and iteratively updates the correlations between different visual features for accurate and timely accident prediction. Evaluated on real-world datasets--Dashcam Accident Dataset (DAD), Car Crash Dataset (CCD), and AnAn Accident Detection (A3D) datasets--our model surpasses existing top baselines in critical evaluation metrics like Average Precision (AP) and mean Time-To-Accident (mTTA). Importantly, its robustness and adaptability are particularly evident in challenging driving scenarios with missing or limited training data, demonstrating significant potential for application in real-world autonomous driving systems.