In network analysis, community detection and network embedding are two important topics. Community detection tends to obtain the most noticeable partition, while network embedding aims at seeking node representations which contains as many diverse properties as possible. We observe that the current community detection and network embedding problems are being resolved by a general solution, i.e., "maximizing the consistency between similar nodes while maximizing the distance between the dissimilar nodes." This general solution only exploits the most noticeable structure (facet) of the network, which effectively satisfies the demands of the community detection. Unfortunately, most of the specific embedding algorithms, which are developed from the general solution, cannot achieve the goal of network embedding by exploring only one facet of the network. To improve the general solution for better modeling the real network, we propose a novel network embedding method, Multi-facet Network Embedding (MNE), to capture the multiple facets of the network. MNE learns multiple embeddings simultaneously, with the Hilbert Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) being the a diversity constraint. To efficiently solve the optimization problem, we propose a Binary HSIC with linear complexity and solve the MNE objective function by adopting the Augmented Lagrange Multiplier (ALM) method. The overall complexity is linear with the scale of the network. Extensive results demonstrate that MNE gives efficient performances and outperforms the state-of-the-art network embedding methods.

Many real-life problems require optimizing functions with expensive evaluations. Bayesian Optimization (BO) and Search-based Optimization (SO) are two broad families of algorithms that try to find the global optima of a function with the goal of minimizing the number of function evaluations. A large body of existing work deals with the single-fidelity setting, where function evaluations are very expensive but accurate. However, in many applications, we have access to multiple-fidelity functions that vary in their cost and accuracy of evaluation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Multi-fidelity Hybrid (MF-Hybrid) that combines the best attributes of both BO and SO methods to discover the global optima of a black-box function with minimal cost. Our experiments on multiple benchmark functions show that the MF-Hybrid algorithm outperforms existing single-fidelity and multi-fidelity optimization algorithms.

Numerous urban planners advocate for differentiated transit pricing to improve both ridership and service equity. Several metropolitan cities are considering switching to a more "fair fare system," where passengers pay according to the distance travelled, rather than a flat fare or zone boundary scheme that discriminates against various marginalized groups. In this paper, we present a two-part optimal pricing formula for switching to distance-based transit fares: the first formula maximizes forecasted revenue given a target ridership, and the second formula maximizes forecasted ridership given a target revenue. Both formulas hold for all price elasticities. Our theory has been successfully tested on the SkyTrain mass transit network in Metro Vancouver, British Columbia, with over 400,000 daily passengers. This research has served Metro Vancouver's transportation authority as they consider changing their fare structure for the first time in over 30 years.

Over the years, government service provision in China has been plagued by inefficiencies. Previous attempts to address this challenge following a toolbox e-government system model in China were not effective. In this paper, we report on a successful experience in improving government service provision in the domain of social insurance in Shandong Province, China. Through standardization of service workflows following the Complete Contract Theory (CCT) and the infusion of an artificial intelligence (AI) engine to maximize the expected quality of service while reducing waiting time, the Smart Human-resource Services (SmartHS) platform transcends organizational boundaries and improves system efficiency. Deployments in 3 cities involving 2,000 participating civil servants and close to 3 million social insurance service cases over a 1 year period demonstrated that SmartHS significantly improves user experience with roughly a third of the original front desk staff. This new AI-enhanced mode of operation is useful for informing current policy discussions in many domains of government service provision.

Recently, saliency detection in a single image and co-saliency detection in multiple images have drawn extensive research interest in the vision community. In this paper, we investigate a new problem of co-saliency detection within a single image, i.e., detecting within-image co-saliency. By identifying common saliency within an image, e.g., highlighting multiple occurrences of an object class with similar appearance, this work can benefit many important applications, such as the detection of objects of interest, more robust object recognition, reduction of information redundancy, and animation synthesis. We propose a new bottom-up method to address this problem. Specifically, a large number of object proposals are first detected from the image. Then we develop an optimization algorithm to derive a set of proposal groups, each of which contains multiple proposals showing good common saliency in the original image. For each proposal group, we calculate a co-saliency map and then use a low-rank based algorithm to fuse the maps calculated from all the proposal groups for the final co-saliency map in the image. In the experiment, we collect a new dataset of 364 color images with within-image cosaliency. Experiment results show that the proposed method can better detect the within-image co-saliency than existing algorithms.

Person re-identification is widely studied in visible spectrum, where all the person images are captured by visible cameras. However, visible cameras may not capture valid appearance information under poor illumination conditions, e.g, at night. In this case, thermal camera is superior since it is less dependent on the lighting by using infrared light to capture the human body. To this end, this paper investigates a cross-modal re-identification problem, namely visible-thermal person re-identification (VT-REID). Existing cross-modal matching methods mainly focus on modeling the cross-modality discrepancy, while VT-REID also suffers from cross-view variations caused by different camera views. Therefore, we propose a hierarchical cross-modality matching model by jointly optimizing the modality-specific and modality-shared metrics. The modality-specific metrics transform two heterogenous modalities into a consistent space that modality-shared metric can be subsequently learnt. Meanwhile, the modality-specific metric compacts features of the same person within each modality to handle the large intra-modality intra-person variations (e.g. viewpoints, pose). Additionally, an improved two-stream CNN network is presented to learn the multi-modality sharable feature representations. Identity loss and contrastive loss are integrated to enhance the discriminability and modality-invariance with partially shared layer parameters. Extensive experiments illustrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.

Tracking target of interests is an important step for motion perception in intelligent video surveillance systems. While most recently developed tracking algorithms are grounded in RGB image sequences, it should be noted that information from RGB modality is not always reliable (e.g. in a dark environment with poor lighting condition), which urges the need to integrate information from infrared modality for effective tracking because of the insensitivity to illumination condition of infrared thermal camera. However, several issues encountered during the tracking process limit the fusing performance of these heterogeneous modalities: 1) the cross-modality discrepancy of visual and motion characteristics, 2) the uncertainty of degree of reliability in different modalities, and 3) large target appearance variations and background distractions within each modality. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel and optimal discriminative learning framework for multi-modality tracking. In particular, the proposed discriminative learning framework is able to: 1) jointly eliminate outlier samples caused by large variations and learn discriminability-consistent features from heterogeneous modalities, and 2) collaboratively perform modality reliability measurement and target-background separation. Extensive experiments on RGB-infrared image sequences demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) is regarded as an effective way to construct classification models for target classes which have no labeled samples available. The basic framework is to transfer knowledge from (different) auxiliary source classes having sufficient labeled samples with some attributes shared by target and source classes as bridge. Attributes play an important role in ZSL but they have not gained sufficient attention in recent years. Previous works mostly assume attributes are perfect and treat each attribute equally. However, as shown in this paper, different attributes have different properties, such as their class distribution, variance, and entropy, which may have considerable impact on ZSL accuracy if treated equally. Based on this observation, in this paper we propose to use a subset of attributes, instead of the whole set, for building ZSL models. The attribute selection is conducted by considering the information amount and predictability under a novel joint optimization framework. To our knowledge, this is the first work that notices the influence of attributes themselves and proposes to use a refined attribute set for ZSL. Since our approach focuses on selecting good attributes for ZSL, it can be combined to any attribute based ZSL approaches so as to augment their performance. Experiments on four ZSL benchmarks demonstrate that our approach can improve zero-shot classification accuracy and yield state-of-the-art results.

Minimal Correction Subsets (MCSs) have been successfully applied to find approximate solutions to several real-world single-objective optimization problems. However, only recently have MCSs been used to solve Multi-Objective Combinatorial Optimization (MOCO) problems. In particular, it has been shown that all optimal solutions of MOCO problems with linear objective functions can be found by an MCS enumeration procedure. In this paper, we show that the approach of MCS enumeration can also be applied to MOCO problems where objective functions are divisions of linear expressions. Hence, it is not necessary to use a linear approximation of these objective functions. Additionally, we also propose the integration of diversification techniques on the MCS enumeration process in order to find better approximations of the Pareto front of MOCO problems. Finally, experimental results on the Virtual Machine Consolidation (VMC) problem show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.

Propositional satisfiability (SAT) is at the nucleus of state-of-the-art approaches to a variety of computationally hard problems, one of which is cryptanalysis. Moreover, a number of practical applications of SAT can only be tackled efficiently by identifying and exploiting a subset of formula's variables called backdoor set (or simply backdoors). This paper proposes a new class of backdoor sets for SAT used in the context of cryptographic attacks, namely guess-and-determine attacks. The idea is to identify the best set of backdoor variables subject to a statistically estimated hardness of the guess-and-determine attack using a SAT solver. Experimental results on weakened variants of the renowned encryption algorithms exhibit advantage of the proposed approach compared to the state of the art in terms of the estimated hardness of the resulting guess-and-determine attacks.