Data-driven soft sensors (DDSS) have become mainstream methods for predicting key performance indicators in process industries. However, DDSS development requires complex and costly customized designs tailored to various tasks during the modeling process. Moreover, DDSS are constrained to a single structured data modality, limiting their ability to incorporate additional contextual knowledge. Furthermore, DDSSs' limited representation learning leads to weak predictive performance with scarce data. To address these challenges, we propose a general framework named LLM-TKESS (large language model for text-based knowledge-embedded soft sensing), harnessing the powerful general problem-solving capabilities, cross-modal knowledge transfer abilities, and few-shot capabilities of LLM for enhanced soft sensing modeling. Specifically, an auxiliary variable series encoder (AVS Encoder) is proposed to unleash LLM's potential for capturing temporal relationships within series and spatial semantic relationships among auxiliary variables. Then, we propose a two-stage fine-tuning alignment strategy: in the first stage, employing parameter-efficient fine-tuning through autoregressive training adjusts LLM to rapidly accommodate process variable data, resulting in a soft sensing foundation model (SSFM). Subsequently, by training adapters, we adapt the SSFM to various downstream tasks without modifying its architecture. Then, we propose two text-based knowledge-embedded soft sensors, integrating new natural language modalities to overcome the limitations of pure structured data models. Furthermore, benefiting from LLM's pre-existing world knowledge, our model demonstrates outstanding predictive capabilities in small sample conditions. Using the thermal deformation of air preheater rotor as a case study, we validate through extensive experiments that LLM-TKESS exhibits outstanding performance.

Data-driven soft sensors are crucial in predicting key performance indicators in industrial systems. However, current methods predominantly rely on the supervised learning paradigms of parameter updating, which inherently faces challenges such as high development costs, poor robustness, training instability, and lack of interpretability. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential across various domains, notably through In-Context Learning (ICL), which enables high-performance task execution with minimal input-label demonstrations and no prior training. This paper aims to replace supervised learning with the emerging ICL paradigm for soft sensor modeling to address existing challenges and explore new avenues for advancement. To achieve this, we propose a novel framework called the Few-shot Uncertainty-aware and self-Explaining Soft Sensor (LLM-FUESS), which includes the Zero-shot Auxiliary Variable Selector (LLM-ZAVS) and the Uncertainty-aware Few-shot Soft Sensor (LLM-UFSS). The LLM-ZAVS retrieves from the Industrial Knowledge Vector Storage to enhance LLMs' domain-specific knowledge, enabling zero-shot auxiliary variable selection. In the LLM-UFSS, we utilize text-based context demonstrations of structured data to prompt LLMs to execute ICL for predicting and propose a context sample retrieval augmentation strategy to improve performance. Additionally, we explored LLMs' AIGC and probabilistic characteristics to propose self-explanation and uncertainty quantification methods for constructing a trustworthy soft sensor. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieved state-of-the-art predictive performance, strong robustness, and flexibility, effectively mitigates training instability found in traditional methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to establish soft sensor utilizing LLMs.

As a powerful tool for characterizing cellular subpopulations and cellular heterogeneity, single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technology offers advantages of high throughput and multidimensional analysis. However, the process of data acquisition is often constrained by high cost and limited sample availability. To overcome these limitations, we propose a hybrid model based on Diffusion model and White-Box transformer that aims to generate synthetic and biologically plausible scRNA-seq data. Diffusion model progressively introduce noise into the data and then recover the original data through a denoising process, a forward and reverse process that is particularly suitable for generating complex data distributions. White-Box transformer is a deep learning architecture that emphasizes mathematical interpretability. By minimizing the encoding rate of the data and maximizing the sparsity of the representation, it not only reduces the computational burden, but also provides clear insight into underlying structure. Our White-Box Diffusion Transformer combines the generative capabilities of Diffusion model with the mathematical interpretability of White-Box transformer. Through experiments using six different single-cell RNA-Seq datasets, we visualize both generated and real data using t-SNE dimensionality reduction technique, as well as quantify similarity between generated and real data using various metrics to demonstrate comparable performance of White-Box Diffusion Transformer and Diffusion Transformer in generating scRNA-seq data alongside significant improvements in training efficiency and resource utilization. Our code is available at https://github.com/lingximamo/White-Box-Diffusion-Transformer

We introduce MarDini, a new family of video diffusion models that integrate the advantages of masked auto-regression (MAR) into a unified diffusion model (DM) framework. Here, MAR handles temporal planning, while DM focuses on spatial generation in an asymmetric network design: i) a MAR-based planning model containing most of the parameters generates planning signals for each masked frame using low-resolution input; ii) a lightweight generation model uses these signals to produce high-resolution frames via diffusion de-noising. MarDini's MAR enables video generation conditioned on any number of masked frames at any frame positions: a single model can handle video interpolation (e.g., masking middle frames), image-to-video generation (e.g., masking from the second frame onward), and video expansion (e.g., masking half the frames). The efficient design allocates most of the computational resources to the low-resolution planning model, making computationally expensive but important spatio-temporal attention feasible at scale. MarDini sets a new state-of-the-art for video interpolation; meanwhile, within few inference steps, it efficiently generates videos on par with those of much more expensive advanced image-to-video models.

Motivation: Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is a groundbreaking technology extensively utilized in biological research, facilitating the examination of gene expression at the individual cell level within a given tissue sample. While numerous tools have been developed for scRNA-seq data analysis, the challenge persists in capturing the distinct features of such data and replicating virtual datasets that share analogous statistical properties. Results: Our study introduces a generative approach termed scRNA-seq Diffusion Transformer (scRDiT). This method generates virtual scRNA-seq data by leveraging a real dataset. The method is a neural network constructed based on Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) and Diffusion Transformers (DiTs). This involves subjecting Gaussian noises to the real dataset through iterative noise-adding steps and ultimately restoring the noises to form scRNA-seq samples. This scheme allows us to learn data features from actual scRNA-seq samples during model training. Our experiments, conducted on two distinct scRNA-seq datasets, demonstrate superior performance. Additionally, the model sampling process is expedited by incorporating Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIM). scRDiT presents a unified methodology empowering users to train neural network models with their unique scRNA-seq datasets, enabling the generation of numerous high-quality scRNA-seq samples. Availability and implementation: https://github.com/DongShengze/scRDiT

Graph Clustering, also known as network clustering, is a technique for partitioning a graph into clusters or communities of nodes based on their structural properties[1]. Graph clustering is used in various applications such as social network analysis, image segmentation, bioinformatics, and more. The goal of graph clustering is to group the nodes in a way to maximizes the similarity within the group and minimizes the similarity between them[2]. These two similarities are usually measured using various metrics such as modularity, Normalized Mutual Information(NMI), Adjusted Rand Index(ARI) and FowlkesMallows Index(FMI).

Transformer-based models have demonstrated excellent capabilities of capturing patterns and structures in natural language generation and achieved state-of-the-art results in many tasks. In this paper we present a transformer-based model for multi-turn dialog response generation. Our solution is based on a hybrid approach which augments a transformer-based generative model with a novel retrieval mechanism, which leverages the memorized information in the training data via k-Nearest Neighbor search. Our system is evaluated on two datasets made by customer/assistant dialogs: the Taskmaster-1, released by Google and holding high quality, goal-oriented conversational data and a proprietary dataset collected from a real customer service call center. Both achieve better BLEU scores over strong baselines.

Understanding the informative behaviour of deep neural networks is challenged by misused estimators and the complexity of network structure, which leads to inconsistent observations and diversified interpretation. Here we propose the LogDet estimator -- a reliable matrix-based entropy estimator that approximates Shannon differential entropy. We construct informative measurements based on LogDet estimator, verify our method with comparable experiments and utilize it to analyse neural network behaviour. Our results demonstrate the LogDet estimator overcomes the drawbacks that emerge from highly diverse and degenerated distribution thus is reliable to estimate entropy in neural networks. The Network analysis results also find a functional distinction between shallow and deeper layers, which can help understand the compression phenomenon in the Information bottleneck theory of neural networks.

In this paper, we explore the open-domain sketch-to-photo translation, which aims to synthesize a realistic photo from a freehand sketch with its class label, even if the sketches of that class are missing in the training data. It is challenging due to the lack of training supervision and the large geometry distortion between the freehand sketch and photo domains. To synthesize the absent freehand sketches from photos, we propose a framework that jointly learns sketch-to-photo and photo-to-sketch generation. However, the generator trained from fake sketches might lead to unsatisfying results when dealing with sketches of missing classes, due to the domain gap between synthesized sketches and real ones. To alleviate this issue, we further propose a simple yet effective open-domain sampling and optimization strategy to "fool" the generator into treating fake sketches as real ones. Our method takes advantage of the learned sketch-to-photo and photo-to-sketch mapping of in-domain data and generalizes them to the open-domain classes. We validate our method on the Scribble and SketchyCOCO datasets. Compared with the recent competing methods, our approach shows impressive results in synthesizing realistic color, texture, and maintaining the geometric composition for various categories of open-domain sketches.

We propose a new assumption in outlier detection: Normal data instances are commonly located in the area that there is hardly any fluctuation on data density, while outliers are often appeared in the area that there is violent fluctuation on data density. And based on this hypothesis, we apply a novel density-based approach to unsupervised outlier detection. This approach, called Quantum Clustering (QC), deals with unlabeled data processing and constructs a potential function to find the centroids of clusters and the outliers. The experiments show that the potential function could clearly find the hidden outliers in data points effectively. Besides, by using QC, we could find more subtle outliers by adjusting the parameter $\sigma$. Moreover, our approach is also evaluated on two datasets (Air Quality Detection and Darwin Correspondence Project) from two different research areas, and the results show the wide applicability of our method.