Papers

Continual learning is an intellectual ability of artificial agents to learn new concepts from sequential data. The main impediment to continual learning is catastrophic forgetting, a severe performance degradation on previously learned tasks. Although simply replaying all previous data or continuously adding the model parameters could alleviate the issue, it is impractical in real-world applications due to the limited available resources. Inspired by the mechanism of the human brain to deepen its past impression, we propose a novel framework, Deep Retrieval and Imagination (DRI), which consists of two components: 1) an embedding network that constructs a unified embedding space without adding model parameters on the arrival of new tasks; and 2) a generative model to produce additional (imaginary) data based on the limited memory. By retrieving the past experiences and corresponding imaginary data, DRI distills knowledge and rebalances the embedding space to further mitigate forgetting. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that DRI can reduce the loss approximation error and improve the robustness through retrieval and imagination, bringing better generalizability to the network. Extensive experiments show that DRI performs significantly better than the existing state-of-the-art continual learning methods and effectively alleviates catastrophic forgetting.

poster session 6 @ blue 5, poster session 12 @ blue 5, oral session 6 @ blue 5, poster session 6, poster session 12, oral session 6

The goal of the crime forecasting problem is to predict different types of crimes for each geographical region (like a neighborhood or censor tract) in the near future. Since nearby regions usually have similar socioeconomic characteristics which indicate similar crime patterns, recent state-of-the-art solutions constructed a distance-based region graph and utilized Graph Neural Network (GNN) techniques for crime forecasting, because the GNN techniques could effectively exploit the latent relationships between neighboring region nodes in the graph if the edges reveal high dependency or correlation. However, this distance-based pre-defined graph can not fully capture crime correlation between regions that are far from each other but share similar crime patterns. Hence, to make a more accurate crime prediction, the main challenge is to learn a better graph that reveals the dependencies between regions in crime occurrences and meanwhile captures the temporal patterns from historical crime records. To address these challenges, we propose an end-to-end graph convolutional recurrent network called HAGEN with several novel designs for crime prediction. Specifically, our framework could jointly capture the crime correlation between regions and the temporal crime dynamics by combining an adaptive region graph learning module with the Diffusion Convolution Gated Recurrent Unit (DCGRU). Based on the homophily assumption of GNN (i.e., graph convolution works better where neighboring nodes share the same label), we propose a homophily-aware constraint to regularize the optimization of the region graph so that neighboring region nodes on the learned graph share similar crime patterns, thus fitting the mechanism of diffusion convolution. Empirical experiments and comprehensive analysis on two real-world datasets showcase the effectiveness of HAGEN.

poster session 6 @ blue 5, poster session 12 @ blue 5, oral session 6 @ blue 5, poster session 6, poster session 12, oral session 6

Geospatio-temporal data are pervasive across numerous application domains, including healthcare, environmental sciences, criminology, and urban computing. These rich datasets can be harnessed to predict extreme events such as disease outbreaks, flooding, crime spikes, traffic congestion, etc. However, since the extreme events are rare, predicting them is a hard problem. Statistical methods based on extreme value theory provide a systematic way for modeling the distribution of extreme values. In particular, the generalized Pareto distribution (GPD) is useful for modeling the distribution of excess values above a certain threshold. However, applying such methods to large-scale geospatio-temporal data is a challenge due to the difficulty in capturing the complex spatial relationships between extreme events at multiple locations. This paper presents a deep learning framework for long-term prediction of the distribution of extreme values at different locations. We highlight its computational challenges and present a novel framework that combines convolutional neural networks with deep set and GPD. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a real-world dataset for modeling extreme climate events.

poster session 6 @ blue 5, poster session 12 @ blue 5, oral session 6 @ blue 5, poster session 6, poster session 12, oral session 6