Effective process monitoring is increasingly vital in industrial automation for ensuring operational safety, necessitating both high accuracy and efficiency. Although Transformers have demonstrated success in various fields, their canonical form based on the self-attention mechanism is inadequate for process monitoring due to two primary limitations: (1) the step-wise correlations captured by self-attention mechanism are difficult to capture discriminative patterns in monitoring logs due to the lacking semantics of each step, thus compromising accuracy; (2) the quadratic computational complexity of self-attention hampers efficiency. To address these issues, we propose DeepFilter, a Transformer-style framework for process monitoring. The core innovation is an efficient filtering layer that excel capturing long-term and periodic patterns with reduced complexity. Equipping with the global filtering layer, DeepFilter enhances both accuracy and efficiency, meeting the stringent demands of process monitoring. Experimental results on real-world process monitoring datasets validate DeepFilter's superiority in terms of accuracy and efficiency compared to existing state-of-the-art models.

Heterogeneous treatment effect (HTE) estimation from observational data poses significant challenges due to treatment selection bias. Existing methods address this bias by minimizing distribution discrepancies between treatment groups in latent space, focusing on global alignment. However, the fruitful aspect of local proximity, where similar units exhibit similar outcomes, is often overlooked. In this study, we propose Proximity-aware Counterfactual Regression (PCR) to exploit proximity for representation balancing within the HTE estimation context. Specifically, we introduce a local proximity preservation regularizer based on optimal transport to depict the local proximity in discrepancy calculation. Furthermore, to overcome the curse of dimensionality that renders the estimation of discrepancy ineffective--exacerbated by limited data availability for HTE estimation--we develop an informative subspace projector, which trades off minimal distance precision for improved sample complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PCR accurately matches units across different treatment groups, effectively mitigates treatment selection bias, and significantly outperforms competitors. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/status/ncr-B697.

Time series modeling aims to encode historical sequence to predict future data, which is crucial in diverse applications: long-term forecast in weather prediction [3, 40], short-term prediction in industrial maintenance [24, 7, 35], and missing data imputation in healthcare [30]. A key challenge in time series modeling, distinguishing it from canonical regression tasks, is the presence of autocorrelation. It refers to the dependence between time steps, which exists in both the input and label sequences. To accommodate autocorrelation in input sequences, diverse forecast models have been developed [28, 5, 8], exemplified by recurrent [29], convolution [37] and graph neural networks [25, 4, 11]. Recently, Transformer-based models, utilizing self-attention mechanisms to dynamically assess autocorrelation, have gained prominence in this line of work [20, 26, 13, 38]. Concurrently, there is a growing trend of incorporating frequency analysis into forecast models [41, 21].

Accurate estimation of multiple quality variables is critical for building industrial soft sensor models, which have long been confronted with data efficiency and negative transfer issues. Methods sharing backbone parameters among tasks address the data efficiency issue; however, they still fail to mitigate the negative transfer problem. To address this issue, a balanced Mixture-of-Experts (BMoE) is proposed in this work, which consists of a multi-gate mixture of experts (MMoE) module and a task gradient balancing (TGB) module. The MoE module aims to portray task relationships, while the TGB module balances the gradients among tasks dynamically. Both of them cooperate to mitigate the negative transfer problem. Experiments on the typical sulfur recovery unit demonstrate that BMoE models task relationship and balances the training process effectively, and achieves better performance than baseline models significantly.

An accurate and explainable automatic monitoring system is critical for the safety of high efficiency energy conversion plants that operate under extreme working condition. Nonetheless, currently available data-driven monitoring systems often fall short in meeting the requirements for either high-accuracy or interpretability, which hinders their application in practice. To overcome this limitation, a data-driven approach, AttentionMixer, is proposed under a generalized message passing framework, with the goal of establishing an accurate and interpretable radiation monitoring framework for energy conversion plants. To improve the model accuracy, the first technical contribution involves the development of spatial and temporal adaptive message passing blocks, which enable the capture of spatial and temporal correlations, respectively; the two blocks are cascaded through a mixing operator. To enhance the model interpretability, the second technical contribution involves the implementation of a sparse message passing regularizer, which eliminates spurious and noisy message passing routes. The effectiveness of the AttentionMixer approach is validated through extensive evaluations on a monitoring benchmark collected from the national radiation monitoring network for nuclear power plants, resulting in enhanced monitoring accuracy and interpretability in practice.

Multi-variate soft sensor seeks accurate estimation of multiple quality variables using measurable process variables, which have emerged as a key factor in improving the quality of industrial manufacturing. The current progress stays in some direct applications of multitask network architectures; however, there are two fundamental issues remain yet to be investigated with these approaches: (1) negative transfer, where sharing representations despite the difference of discriminate representations for different objectives degrades performance; (2) seesaw phenomenon, where the optimizer focuses on one dominant yet simple objective at the expense of others. In this study, we reformulate the multi-variate soft sensor to a multi-objective problem, to address both issues and advance state-of-the-art performance. To handle the negative transfer issue, we first propose an Objective-aware Mixture-of-Experts (OMoE) module, utilizing objective-specific and objective-shared experts for parameter sharing while maintaining the distinction between objectives. To address the seesaw phenomenon, we then propose a Pareto Objective Routing (POR) module, adjusting the weights of learning objectives dynamically to achieve the Pareto optimum, with solid theoretical supports. We further present a Task-aware Mixture-of-Experts framework for achieving the Pareto optimum (TMoE-P) in multi-variate soft sensor, which consists of a stacked OMoE module and a POR module. We illustrate the efficacy of TMoE-P with an open soft sensor benchmark, where TMoE-P effectively alleviates the negative transfer and seesaw issues and outperforms the baseline models.

As a basic research problem for building effective recommender systems, post-click conversion rate (CVR) estimation has long been plagued by sample selection bias and data sparsity issues. To address the data sparsity issue, prevalent methods based on entire space multi-task model leverage the sequential pattern of user actions, i.e. exposure $\rightarrow$ click $\rightarrow$ conversion to construct auxiliary learning tasks. However, they still fall short of guaranteeing the unbiasedness of CVR estimates. This paper theoretically demonstrates two defects of these entire space multi-task models: (1) inherent estimation bias (IEB) for CVR estimation, where the CVR estimate is inherently higher than the ground truth; (2) potential independence priority (PIP) for CTCVR estimation, where the causality from click to conversion might be overlooked. This paper further proposes a principled method named entire space counterfactual multi-task model (ESCM$^2$), which employs a counterfactual risk minimizer to handle both IEB and PIP issues at once. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, this paper explores its parameter tuning in practice, derives its analytic properties, and showcases its effectiveness in industrial CVR estimation, where ESCM$^2$ can effectively alleviate the intrinsic IEB and PIP issues and outperform baseline models.

The effectiveness of shortcut/skip-connection has been widely verified, which inspires massive explorations on neural architecture design. This work attempts to find an effective way to design new network architectures. it is discovered that the main difference between network architectures can be reflected in their recursion formulas. Based on this, a methodology is proposed to design novel network architectures from the perspective of mathematical formulas. Afterwards, a case study is provided to generate an improved architecture based on ResNet. Furthermore, the new architecture is compared with ResNet and then tested on ResNet-based networks. Massive experiments are conducted on CIFAR and ImageNet, which witnesses the significant performance improvements provided by the architecture.