13 December 2023 in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Partial label learning (PLL) is an important problem that allows each training example to be labeled with a coarse candidate set with the ground-truth label included. However, in a more practical but challenging scenario, the annotator may miss the ground-truth and provide a wrong candidate set, which is known as the noisy PLL problem. To remedy this problem, we propose the PiCO+ framework that simultaneously disambiguates the candidate sets and mitigates label noise. Core to PiCO+, we develop a novel label disambiguation algorithm PiCO that consists of a contrastive learning module along with a novel class prototype-based disambiguation method. Theoretically, we show that these two components are mutually beneficial, and can be rigorously justified from an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm perspective. To handle label noise, we extend PiCO to PiCO+, which further performs distance-based clean sample selection, and learns robust classifiers by a semi-supervised contrastive learning algorithm. Beyond this, we further investigate the robustness of PiCO+ in the context of out-of-distribution noise and incorporate a novel energy-based rejection method for improved robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed methods significantly outperform the current state-of-the-art approaches in standard and noisy PLL tasks and even achieve comparable results to fully supervised learning.
12 July 2024 in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
During software development and maintenance, vulnerability detection is an essential part of software quality assurance. Even though many program-analysis-based and machine-learning-based approaches have been proposed to automatically detect vulnerabilities, they rely on explicit rules or patterns defined by security experts and suffer from either high false positives or high false negatives. Recently, an increasing number of studies leverage deep learning techniques, especially Graph Neural Network (GNN), to detect vulnerabilities. These approaches leverage program analysis to represent the program semantics as graphs and perform graph analysis to detect vulnerabilities. However, they suffer from two main problems: (i) Existing GNN-based techniques do not effectively learn the structural and semantic features from source code for vulnerability detection. (ii) These approaches tend to ignore fine-grained information in source code. To tackle these problems, in this paper, we propose a novel vulnerability detection approach, named MGVD ( M ULTIPLE- G RAPH-BASED V ULNERABILITY D ETECTION), to detect vulnerable functions. To effectively learn the structural and semantic features from source code, MGVD uses three different ways to represent each function into multiple forms, i.e., two statement graphs and a sequence of tokens. Then we encode such representations to a three-channel feature matrix. The feature matrix contains the structural feature and the semantic feature of the function. And we add a weight allocation layer to distribute the weights between structural and semantic features. To overcome the second problem, MGVD constructs each graph representation of the input function using multiple different graphs instead of a single graph. Each graph focuses on one statement in the function and its nodes denote the related statements and their fine-grained code elements. Finally, MGVD leverages CNN to identify whether this function is vulnerable based on such feature matrix. We conduct experiments on 3 vulnerability datasets with a total of 30,341 vulnerable functions and 127,931 non-vulnerable functions. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art by 9.68% – 10.28% in terms of F1-score.
1 January 2021 in The VLDB Journal
6 November 2015 in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems
The collective spatial keyword query (CSKQ), an important variant of spatial keyword queries, aims to find a set of the objects that collectively cover users' queried keywords, and those objects are close to the query location and have small inter-object distances. Existing works only focus on the CSKQ problem in the Euclidean space, although we observe that, in many real-life applications, the closeness of two spatial objects is measured by their road network distance. Thus, existing methods cannot solve the problem of network-based CSKQ efficiently. In this paper, we study the problem of collective spatial keyword query processing on road networks, where the objects are located on a predefined road network. We first prove that this problem is NP-complete, and then we propose two approximate algorithms with provable approximation bounds and one exact algorithm, for supporting CSKQ on road networks efficiently. Extensive experiments using real datasets demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of our presented algorithms.
18 October 2018 in IEEE Transactions on Multimedia
Big data analytics has been revolutionizing the fashion industry in recent years. This is evidenced by the fact that popular fashion brands and designers have relied on big data analytics to trace fashion trends and predict market patterns. In this work, we propose to learn a common latent feature representation from heterogeneous fashion data. Specifically, we design a multi-modal and multi-domain embedding learning framework for fashion analysis and data retrieval. Unlike most of the existing multi-view embedding methods, which only consider the heterogeneous similarity constraint, our proposed framework jointly considers both the homogeneous and heterogeneous similarity constraints to capture cross-view similarity and preserve the similarity of the same view. The proposed framework is comprised of two projection steps. In the first projection, a quintuplet-based ranking loss is proposed for multi-domain fashion data to preserve the homogeneous similarity. In the second projection, a cross-view similarity ranking loss is designed for multi-modal fashion data to capture heterogeneous similarity. By utilizing the learned common latent feature representation, the distance between any vector pairs from same or different modalities can reflect its semantic similarity. Quantitative evaluation on a new large-scale dataset and a fashion analysis case study demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.