Automated plot generation is the challenge of generating a sequence of events that will be perceived by readers as the plot of a coherent story. Traditional symbolic planners plan a story from a goal state and guarantee logical causal plot coherence but rely on a library of hand-crafted actions with their preconditions and effects. This closed world setting limits the length and diversity of what symbolic planners can generate. On the other hand, pre-trained neural language models can generate stories with great diversity, while being generally incapable of ending a story in a specified manner and can have trouble maintaining coherence. In this paper, we present an approach to story plot generation that unifies causal planning with neural language models. We propose to use commonsense knowledge extracted from large language models to recursively expand a story plot in a backward chaining fashion. Specifically, our system infers the preconditions for events in the story and then events that will cause those conditions to become true. We performed automatic evaluation to measure narrative coherence as indicated by the ability to answer questions about whether different events in the story are causally related to other events. Results indicate that our proposed method produces more coherent plotlines than several strong baselines.

The development of social media user stance detection and bot detection methods rely heavily on large-scale and high-quality benchmarks. However, in addition to low annotation quality, existing benchmarks generally have incomplete user relationships, suppressing graph-based account detection research. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-Relational Graph-Based Twitter Account Detection Benchmark (MGTAB), the first standardized graph-based benchmark for account detection. To our knowledge, MGTAB was built based on the largest original data in the field, with over 1.55 million users and 130 million tweets. MGTAB contains 10,199 expert-annotated users and 7 types of relationships, ensuring high-quality annotation and diversified relations. In MGTAB, we extracted the 20 user property features with the greatest information gain and user tweet features as the user features. In addition, we performed a thorough evaluation of MGTAB and other public datasets. Our experiments found that graph-based approaches are generally more effective than feature-based approaches and perform better when introducing multiple relations. By analyzing experiment results, we identify effective approaches for account detection and provide potential future research directions in this field. Our benchmark and standardized evaluation procedures are freely available at: https://github.com/GraphDetec/MGTAB.

Image Virtual try-on aims at replacing the cloth on a personal image with a garment image (in-shop clothes), which has attracted increasing attention from the multimedia and computer vision communities. Prior methods successfully preserve the character of clothing images, however, occlusion remains a pernicious effect for realistic virtual try-on. In this work, we first present a comprehensive analysis of the occlusions and categorize them into two aspects: i) Inherent-Occlusion: the ghost of the former cloth still exists in the try-on image; ii) Acquired-Occlusion: the target cloth warps to the unreasonable body part. Based on the in-depth analysis, we find that the occlusions can be simulated by a novel semantically-guided mixup module, which can generate semantic-specific occluded images that work together with the try-on images to facilitate training a de-occlusion try-on (DOC-VTON) framework. Specifically, DOC-VTON first conducts a sharpened semantic parsing on the try-on person. Aided by semantics guidance and pose prior, various complexities of texture are selectively blending with human parts in a copy-and-paste manner. Then, the Generative Module (GM) is utilized to take charge of synthesizing the final try-on image and learning to de-occlusion jointly. In comparison to the state-of-the-art methods, DOC-VTON achieves better perceptual quality by reducing occlusion effects.

Dynamic treatment regimes assign personalized treatments to patients sequentially over time based on their baseline information and time-varying covariates. In mobile health applications, these covariates are typically collected at different frequencies over a long time horizon. In this paper, we propose a deep spectral Q-learning algorithm, which integrates principal component analysis (PCA) with deep Q-learning to handle the mixed frequency data. In theory, we prove that the mean return under the estimated optimal policy converges to that under the optimal one and establish its rate of convergence. The usefulness of our proposal is further illustrated via simulations and an application to a diabetes dataset.

As natural language processing (NLP) for gender bias becomes a significant interdisciplinary topic, the prevalent data-driven techniques such as large-scale language models suffer from data inadequacy and biased corpus, especially for languages with insufficient resources such as Chinese. To this end, we propose a Chinese cOrpus foR Gender bIas Probing and Mitigation CORGI-PM, which contains 32.9k sentences with high-quality labels derived by following an annotation scheme specifically developed for gender bias in the Chinese context. Moreover, we address three challenges for automatic textual gender bias mitigation, which requires the models to detect, classify, and mitigate textual gender bias. We also conduct experiments with state-of-the-art language models to provide baselines. To our best knowledge, CORGI-PM is the first sentence-level Chinese corpus for gender bias probing and mitigation.

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is a method for estimating the return of a target policy using some pre-collected observational data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. In some cases, there may be unmeasured variables that can confound the action-reward or action-next-state relationships, rendering many existing OPE approaches ineffective. This paper develops an instrumental variable (IV)-based method for consistent OPE in confounded Markov decision processes (MDPs). Similar to single-stage decision making, we show that IV enables us to correctly identify the target policy's value in infinite horizon settings as well. Furthermore, we propose an efficient and robust value estimator and illustrate its effectiveness through extensive simulations and analysis of real data from a world-leading short-video platform.

Off-Policy evaluation (OPE) is concerned with evaluating a new target policy using offline data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. It is critical in a number of sequential decision making problems ranging from healthcare to technology industries. Most of the work in existing literature is focused on evaluating the mean outcome of a given policy, and ignores the variability of the outcome. However, in a variety of applications, criteria other than the mean may be more sensible. For example, when the reward distribution is skewed and asymmetric, quantile-based metrics are often preferred for their robustness. In this paper, we propose a doubly-robust inference procedure for quantile OPE in sequential decision making and study its asymptotic properties. In particular, we propose utilizing state-of-the-art deep conditional generative learning methods to handle parameter-dependent nuisance function estimation. We demonstrate the advantages of this proposed estimator through both simulations and a real-world dataset from a short-video platform. In particular, we find that our proposed estimator outperforms classical OPE estimators for the mean in settings with heavy-tailed reward distributions.

The ability to jointly learn from multiple modalities, such as text, audio, and visual data, is a defining feature of intelligent systems. While there have been promising advances in designing neural networks to harness multimodal data, the enormous success of data augmentation currently remains limited to single-modality tasks like image classification. Indeed, it is particularly difficult to augment each modality while preserving the overall semantic structure of the data; for example, a caption may no longer be a good description of an image after standard augmentations have been applied, such as translation. Moreover, it is challenging to specify reasonable transformations that are not tailored to a particular modality. In this paper, we introduce LeMDA, Learning Multimodal Data Augmentation, an easy-to-use method that automatically learns to jointly augment multimodal data in feature space, with no constraints on the identities of the modalities or the relationship between modalities. We show that LeMDA can (1) profoundly improve the performance of multimodal deep learning architectures, (2) apply to combinations of modalities that have not been previously considered, and (3) achieve state-of-the-art results on a wide range of applications comprised of image, text, and tabular data.

The utilization of large-scale distributed renewable energy promotes the development of the multi-microgrid (MMG), which raises the need of developing an effective energy management method to minimize economic costs and keep self energy-sufficiency. The multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) has been widely used for the energy management problem because of its real-time scheduling ability. However, its training requires massive energy operation data of microgrids (MGs), while gathering these data from different MGs would threaten their privacy and data security. Therefore, this paper tackles this practical yet challenging issue by proposing a federated multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (F-MADRL) algorithm via the physics-informed reward. In this algorithm, the federated learning (FL) mechanism is introduced to train the F-MADRL algorithm thus ensures the privacy and the security of data. In addition, a decentralized MMG model is built, and the energy of each participated MG is managed by an agent, which aims to minimize economic costs and keep self energy-sufficiency according to the physics-informed reward. At first, MGs individually execute the self-training based on local energy operation data to train their local agent models. Then, these local models are periodically uploaded to a server and their parameters are aggregated to build a global agent, which will be broadcasted to MGs and replace their local agents. In this way, the experience of each MG agent can be shared and the energy operation data is not explicitly transmitted, thus protecting the privacy and ensuring data security. Finally, experiments are conducted on Oak Ridge national laboratory distributed energy control communication lab microgrid (ORNL-MG) test system, and the comparisons are carried out to verify the effectiveness of introducing the FL mechanism and the outperformance of our proposed F-MADRL.

The development of deep learning models in medical image analysis is majorly limited by the lack of large-sized and well-annotated datasets. Unsupervised learning does not require labels and is more suitable for solving medical image analysis problems. However, most of the current unsupervised learning methods need to be applied to large datasets. To make unsupervised learning applicable to small datasets, we proposed Swin MAE, which is a masked autoencoder with Swin Transformer as its backbone. Even on a dataset of only a few thousand medical images and without using any pre-trained models, Swin MAE is still able to learn useful semantic features purely from images. It can equal or even slightly outperform the supervised model obtained by Swin Transformer trained on ImageNet in terms of the transfer learning results of downstream tasks. The code will be publicly available soon.