Survival prognosis is crucial for medical informatics. Practitioners often confront small-sized clinical data, especially cancer patient cases, which can be insufficient to induce useful patterns for survival predictions. This study deals with small sample survival analysis by leveraging transfer learning, a useful machine learning technique that can enhance the target analysis with related knowledge pre-learned from other data. We propose and develop various transfer learning methods designed for common survival models. For parametric models such as DeepSurv, Cox-CC (Cox-based neural networks), and DeepHit (end-to-end deep learning model), we apply standard transfer learning techniques like pretraining and fine-tuning. For non-parametric models such as Random Survival Forest, we propose a new transfer survival forest (TSF) model that transfers tree structures from source tasks and fine-tunes them with target data. We evaluated the transfer learning methods on colorectal cancer (CRC) prognosis. The source data are 27,379 SEER CRC stage I patients, and the target data are 728 CRC stage I patients from the West China Hospital. When enhanced by transfer learning, Cox-CC's $C^{td}$ value was boosted from 0.7868 to 0.8111, DeepHit's from 0.8085 to 0.8135, DeepSurv's from 0.7722 to 0.8043, and RSF's from 0.7940 to 0.8297 (the highest performance). All models trained with data as small as 50 demonstrated even more significant improvement. Conclusions: Therefore, the current survival models used for cancer prognosis can be enhanced and improved by properly designed transfer learning techniques. The source code used in this study is available at https://github.com/YonghaoZhao722/TSF.

Nowadays, with advanced information technologies deployed citywide, large data volumes and powerful computational resources are intelligentizing modern city development. As an important part of intelligent transportation, route recommendation and its applications are widely used, directly influencing citizens` travel habits. Developing smart and efficient travel routes based on big data (possibly multi-modal) has become a central challenge in route recommendation research. Our survey offers a comprehensive review of route recommendation work based on urban computing. It is organized by the following three parts: 1) Methodology-wise. We categorize a large volume of traditional machine learning and modern deep learning methods. Also, we discuss their historical relations and reveal the edge-cutting progress. 2) Application\-wise. We present numerous novel applications related to route commendation within urban computing scenarios. 3) We discuss current problems and challenges and envision several promising research directions. We believe that this survey can help relevant researchers quickly familiarize themselves with the current state of route recommendation research and then direct them to future research trends.

With the digitization of modern cities, large data volumes and powerful computational resources facilitate the rapid update of intelligent models deployed in smart cities. Continual learning (CL) is a novel machine learning paradigm that constantly updates models to adapt to changing environments, where the learning tasks, data, and distributions can vary over time. Our survey provides a comprehensive review of continual learning methods that are widely used in smart city development. The content consists of three parts: 1) Methodology-wise. We categorize a large number of basic CL methods and advanced CL frameworks in combination with other learning paradigms including graph learning, spatial-temporal learning, multi-modal learning, and federated learning. 2) Application-wise. We present numerous CL applications covering transportation, environment, public health, safety, networks, and associated datasets related to urban computing. 3) Challenges. We discuss current problems and challenges and envision several promising research directions. We believe this survey can help relevant researchers quickly familiarize themselves with the current state of continual learning research used in smart city development and direct them to future research trends.

Multi-scale features have been proven highly effective for object detection but often come with huge and even prohibitive extra computation costs, especially for the recent Transformer-based detectors. In this paper, we propose Iterative Multi-scale Feature Aggregation (IMFA) -- a generic paradigm that enables efficient use of multi-scale features in Transformer-based object detectors. The core idea is to exploit sparse multi-scale features from just a few crucial locations, and it is achieved with two novel designs. First, IMFA rearranges the Transformer encoder-decoder pipeline so that the encoded features can be iteratively updated based on the detection predictions. Second, IMFA sparsely samples scale-adaptive features for refined detection from just a few keypoint locations under the guidance of prior detection predictions. As a result, the sampled multi-scale features are sparse yet still highly beneficial for object detection. Extensive experiments show that the proposed IMFA boosts the performance of multiple Transformer-based object detectors significantly yet with only slight computational overhead.

This paper reports the results and post-challenge analyses of ChaLearn's AutoDL challenge series, which helped sorting out a profusion of AutoML solutions for Deep Learning (DL) that had been introduced in a variety of settings, but lacked fair comparisons. All input data modalities (time series, images, videos, text, tabular) were formatted as tensors and all tasks were multi-label classification problems. Code submissions were executed on hidden tasks, with limited time and computational resources, pushing solutions that get results quickly. In this setting, DL methods dominated, though popular Neural Architecture Search (NAS) was impractical. Solutions relied on fine-tuned pre-trained networks, with architectures matching data modality. Post-challenge tests did not reveal improvements beyond the imposed time limit. While no component is particularly original or novel, a high level modular organization emerged featuring a "meta-learner", "data ingestor", "model selector", "model/learner", and "evaluator". This modularity enabled ablation studies, which revealed the importance of (off-platform) meta-learning, ensembling, and efficient data management. Experiments on heterogeneous module combinations further confirm the (local) optimality of the winning solutions. Our challenge legacy includes an ever-lasting benchmark (http://autodl.chalearn.org), the open-sourced code of the winners, and a free "AutoDL self-service".

Neural relation extraction models have shown promising results in recent years; however, the model performance drops dramatically given only a few training samples. Recent works try leveraging the advance in few-shot learning to solve the low resource problem, where they train label-agnostic models to directly compare the semantic similarities among context sentences in the embedding space. However, the label-aware information, i.e., the relation label that contains the semantic knowledge of the relation itself, is often neglected for prediction. In this work, we propose a framework considering both label-agnostic and label-aware semantic mapping information for low resource relation extraction. We show that incorporating the above two types of mapping information in both pretraining and fine-tuning can significantly improve the model performance on low-resource relation extraction tasks.

Few-shot object detection aims at detecting novel objects with only a few annotated examples. Prior works have proved meta-learning a promising solution, and most of them essentially address detection by meta-learning over regions for their classification and location fine-tuning. However, these methods substantially rely on initially well-located region proposals, which are usually hard to obtain under the few-shot settings. This paper presents a novel meta-detector framework, namely Meta-DETR, which eliminates region-wise prediction and instead meta-learns object localization and classification at image level in a unified and complementary manner. Specifically, it first encodes both support and query images into category-specific features and then feeds them into a category-agnostic decoder to directly generate predictions for specific categories. To facilitate meta-learning with deep networks, we design a simple but effective Semantic Alignment Mechanism (SAM), which aligns high-level and low-level feature semantics to improve the generalization of meta-learned representations. Experiments over multiple few-shot object detection benchmarks show that Meta-DETR outperforms state-of-the-art methods by large margins.

Continual learning with neural networks is an important learning framework in AI that aims to learn a sequence of tasks well. However, it is often confronted with three challenges: (1) overcome the catastrophic forgetting problem, (2) adapt the current network to new tasks, and meanwhile (3) control its model complexity. To reach these goals, we propose a novel approach named as Continual Learning with Efficient Architecture Search, or CLEAS in short. CLEAS works closely with neural architecture search (NAS) which leverages reinforcement learning techniques to search for the best neural architecture that fits a new task. In particular, we design a neuron-level NAS controller that decides which old neurons from previous tasks should be reused (knowledge transfer), and which new neurons should be added (to learn new knowledge). Such a fine-grained controller allows one to find a very concise architecture that can fit each new task well. Meanwhile, since we do not alter the weights of the reused neurons, we perfectly memorize the knowledge learned from previous tasks. We evaluate CLEAS on numerous sequential classification tasks, and the results demonstrate that CLEAS outperforms other state-of-the-art alternative methods, achieving higher classification accuracy while using simpler neural architectures.

Learning of classification models from real-world data often requires additional human expert effort to annotate the data. However, this process can be rather costly and finding ways of reducing the human annotation effort is critical for this task. The objective of this paper is to develop and study new ways of providing human feedback for efficient learning of classification models by labeling groups of examples. Briefly, unlike traditional active learning methods that seek feedback on individual examples, we develop a new group-based active learning framework that solicits label information on groups of multiple examples. In order to describe groups in a user-friendly way, conjunctive patterns are used to compactly represent groups. Our empirical study on 12 UCI data sets demonstrates the advantages and superiority of our approach over both classic instance-based active learning work, as well as existing group-based active-learning methods.