Yew Soon Ong

• Nanyang Technological University

Students with strong Computational Thinking (CT) skills possess a unique ability to analyze problems, devise efficient solutions, and navigate the intricacies of a rapidly evolving digital landscape. Given the conceptual overlapping between CT skills and engineering design competencies, engineering design processes provide students with a context f...

With the proliferation of spatio-textual data, Top-k KNN spatial keyword queries (TkQs), which return a list of objects based on a ranking function that considers both spatial and textual relevance, have found many real-life applications. To efficiently handle TkQs, many indexes have been developed, but the effectiveness of TkQ is limited. To impro...

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated impressive Novel View Synthesis (NVS) results in a real-time rendering manner. During training, it relies heavily on the average magnitude of view-space positional gradients to grow Gaussians to reduce rendering loss. However, this average operation smooths the positional gradients from different viewpo...

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising potential for next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation. However, existing methods only perform direct zero-shot prompting, leading to ineffective extraction of user preferences, insufficient injection of collaborative signals, and a lack of user privacy protection. As such, we propose a novel Mul...

The increasing use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) tools in education highlights the need to understand their influence on individuals' thinking processes and agency. This research explored 20 university students' interaction with GAI during programming. Participants completed surveys, recorded their screens during an hour-long programm...

The rapid development of AI models has led to a growing emphasis on enhancing their capabilities for complex input data such as videos. While large-scale video datasets have been introduced to support this growth, the unique challenges of reducing redundancies in video \textbf{sets} have not been explored. Compared to image datasets or individual v...

Few-Shot Learning (FSL) is a challenging task, which aims to recognize novel classes with few examples. Pre-training based methods effectively tackle the problem by pre-training a feature extractor and then performing class prediction via a cosine classifier with mean-based prototypes. Nevertheless, due to the data scarcity, the mean-based prototyp...

In the evolutionary computing community, the remarkable language-handling capabilities and reasoning power of large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced the functionality of evolutionary algorithms (EAs), enabling them to tackle optimization problems involving structured language or program code. Although this field is still in its ea...

Despite remarkable achievements in deep learning across various domains, its inherent vulnerability to adversarial examples still remains a critical concern for practical deployment. Adversarial training has emerged as one of the most effective defensive techniques for improving model robustness against such malicious inputs. However, existing adve...

The 2024 IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence was held from 25-27 June at the Marina Bay Sands Conference Centre in Singapore (Figure 1). IEEE CAI 2024, the second edition of this conference and exhibition, emphasised AI applications and key AI verticals impacting industrial technology and innovation. Similar to the inaugural event in June 20...

With growing environmental concerns, electric vehicles for logistics have gained significant attention within the computational intelligence community in recent years. This work addresses an emerging and significant extension of the electric vehicle routing problem (EVRP), namely EVRP with time windows, simultaneous pickup-delivery, and partial rec...

Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm that allows multiple FL participants (FL-PTs) to collaborate on training models without sharing private data. Due to data heterogeneity, negative transfer may occur in the FL training process. This necessitates FL-PT selection based on their data complementarity. In cross-silo FL, organizations...

Novel view synthesis with sparse inputs poses great challenges to Neural Radiance Field (NeRF). Recent works demonstrate that the frequency regularization of Positional Encoding (PE) can achieve promising results for few-shot NeRF. In this work, we reveal that there exists an inconsistency between the frequency regularization of PE and rendering lo...

We present MosaicFusion, a simple yet effective diffusion-based data augmentation approach for large vocabulary instance segmentation. Our method is training-free and does not rely on any label supervision. Two key designs enable us to employ an off-the-shelf text-to-image diffusion model as a useful dataset generator for object instances and mask...

In Recent years, the rapid advancements in computational and artificial intelligence (C/AI) have led to successful applications across various disciplines, driven by neural networks and powerful computing hardware. However, these achievements come with a significant challenge: the resource-intensive nature of current AI systems, particularly deep l...

Graph clusters (or communities) represent important graph structural information. In this paper, we present D ifferentiable C lustering for graph AT tention (DCAT). To the best of our knowledge, DCAT is the first solution that incorporates graph clustering into graph attention networks (GAT) to learn cluster-aware attention scores for semi-su...

In this paper, we present Reed-Solomon coded single-stranded representation learning (RSRL), a novel end-to-end model for learning representations for multi-modal lossless DNA storage. In contrast to existing learning-based methods, the proposed RSRL is inspired by both error-correction codec and structural biology. Specifically, RSRL first learns...

Transfer optimization enables data-efficient optimization of a target task by leveraging experiential priors from related source tasks. This is especially useful in multiobjective optimization settings where a set of trade-off solutions is sought under tight evaluation budgets. In this paper, we introduce a novel concept of inverse transfer in mult...

The rapid research and development of generative artificial intelligence has enabled the generation of high-quality images, text, and 3D models from text prompts. This advancement impels an inquiry into whether these models can be leveraged to create digital artifacts for both creative and engineering applications. Drawing on innovative designs fro...

Engineering design optimization requires an efficient combination of a 3D shape representation, an optimization algorithm, and a design performance evaluation method, which is often computationally expensive. We present a prompt evolution design optimization (PEDO) framework contextualized in a vehicle design scenario that leverages a vision-langua...

Road network representation learning aims to learn compressed and effective vectorized representations for road segments that are applicable to numerous tasks. In this paper, we identify the limitations of existing methods, particularly their overemphasis on the distance effect as outlined in the First Law of Geography. In response, we propose to e...

Diffusion models have demonstrated great potential in generating high-quality content for images, natural language, protein domains, etc. However, how to perform user-preferred targeted generation via diffusion models with only black-box target scores of users remains challenging. To address this issue, we first formulate the fine-tuning of the tar...

This research investigates distinct human-generative AI collaboration types and students' interaction experiences when collaborating with generative AI (i.e., ChatGPT) for problem-solving tasks and how these factors relate to students' sense of agency and perceived collaborative problem solving. By analyzing the surveys and reflections of 79 underg...

The development of automated high-throughput experimental platforms has enabled fast sampling of high-dimensional decision spaces. To reach target properties efficiently, these platforms are increasingly paired with intelligent experimental design. However, current optimizers show limitations in maintaining sufficient exploration/exploitation balan...

Video-based facial analysis is important for autonomous agents to understand human expressions and sentiments. However, limited labeled data is available to learn effective facial representations. This paper proposes a novel self-supervised face-centric pretraining framework, called PrefAce, which learns transferable video facial representation wit...

Federated learning (FL) provides a privacy-preserving approach for collaborative training of machine learning models. Given the potential data heterogeneity, it is crucial to select appropriate collaborators for each FL participant (FL-PT) based on data complementarity. Recent studies have addressed this challenge. Similarly, it is imperative to co...

With the rapid development of Internet and Web techniques, Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) models have been widely explored for resolving the data-sparsity and cold-start problem. Meanwhile, most CDR models should utilize explicit domain-shareable information (e.g., overlapped users or items) for knowledge transfer across domains. However, this a...

Product bundling represents a prevalent marketing strategy in both offline stores and e-commerce systems. Despite its widespread use, previous studies on bundle recommendation face two significant limitations. Firstly, they rely on noisy datasets, where bundles are defined by heuristics, e.g., products co-purchased in the same session. Secondly, th...

In this paper, we present Polarized message-passing (PMP), a novel paradigm to revolutionize the design of message-passing graph neural networks (GNNs). In contrast to existing methods, PMP captures the power of node-node similarity and dissimilarity to acquire dual sources of messages from neighbors. The messages are then coalesced to enable GNNs...

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have shown applicability in a wide range of engineering domains. However, there remain some challenges in their use, namely, PINNs are notoriously difficult to train and prone to failure when dealing with complex tasks with multi-frequency patterns or steep gradients in the outputs. In this work, we leverage...

Transfer multiobjective optimization promises sample-efficient discovery of near Pareto-optimal solutions to a target task by utilizing experiential priors from related source tasks. In this paper, we show that in domains where evaluation data is at a premium, e.g., in scientific and engineering disciplines involving time-consuming computer simulat...

Transfer multiobjective optimization promises sample-efficient discovery of near Pareto-optimal solutions to a target task by utilizing experiential priors from related source tasks. In this paper, we show that in domains where evaluation data is at a premium, e.g., in scientific and engineering disciplines involving time-consuming computer simulat...

Recently, with the enhancement of drone's payload and endurance capability, drone logistics has received extensive attention from giant logistics enterprises. This research delves into the Heterogeneous multi-Drone Delivery Pickup Problem (HDDPP) through a novel distribution mode. Here, a large drone ferries multiple smaller drones to a specified s...

Detecting and quantifying abnormal crowd motion emerging from complex interactions of individuals is paramount to ensure the safety of crowds. Crowd-level abnormal behaviors (CABs), e.g., counter flow and crowd turbulence, are proven to be the crucial causes of many crowd disasters. Unlike individual-level anomaly, CABs usually do not exhibit salie...

The development of automated high-throughput experimental platforms has enabled fast sampling of high-dimensional decision spaces. To reach target properties efficiently, these platforms are increasingly paired with intelligent experimental design. However, current optimizers show limitations in maintaining sufficient exploration/exploitation balan...

Multitask Gaussian process (MTGP) is a well-known nonparametric Bayesian model for learning correlated tasks effectively by transferring knowledge across tasks. But current MTGPs are usually limited to the multitask scenario defined in the same input domain, leaving no space for tackling the heterogeneous case, i.e., the features of input domains v...

Studies have shown evolution strategies (ES) to be a promising approach for reinforcement learning (RL) with deep neural networks. However, the issue of high sample complexity persists in applications of ES to deep RL over long horizons. This paper is the first to address the shortcoming of todays methods via a novel neuroevolutionary multitasking...

The development of automated high-throughput experimental platforms has enabled fast sampling of high-dimensional decision spaces. To reach target properties efficiently, these platforms are increasingly paired with intelligent experimental design. When solving optimization problems, Bayesian-based optimizers are often chosen for their ability to s...

Most existing point-of-interest (POI) recommenders aim to capture user preference by employing city-level user historical check-ins, thus facilitating users' exploration of the city. However, the scarcity of city-level user check-ins brings a significant challenge to user preference learning. Although prior studies attempt to mitigate this challeng...

For deep learning, size is power. Massive neural nets trained on broad data for a spectrum of tasks are at the forefront of artificial intelligence. These large pre-trained models or “Jacks of All Trades” (JATs), when fine-tuned for downstream tasks, are gaining importance in driving deep learning advancements. However, environments with tight reso...

The pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has led to a global public health crisis, which caused millions of deaths and billions of infections, greatly increasing the pressure on medical resources. With the continuous emergence of viral mutations, developing automated tools for COVID-19 diagnosis is highly desired to assist the clinical d...

Multi-party learning provides an effective approach for training a machine learning model, e.g., deep neural networks (DNNs), over decentralized data by leveraging multiple decentralized computing devices, subjected to legal and practical constraints. Different parties, so-called local participants, usually provide heterogenous data in a decentrali...

Current session-based recommender systems (SBRSs) mainly focus on maximizing recommendation accuracy, while few studies have been devoted to improve diversity beyond accuracy. Meanwhile, it is unclear how the accuracy-oriented SBRSs perform in terms of diversity. Besides, the asserted “trade-off” relationship between accuracy and diversity has been...

Most existing point-of-interest (POI) recommenders aim to capture user preference by employing city-level user historical check-ins, thus facilitating users’ exploration of the city. However, the scarcity of city-level user check-ins brings a significant challenge to user preference learning. Although prior studies attempt to mitigate this challeng...

Synthesis of digital artifacts conditioned on user prompts has become an important paradigm facilitating an explosion of use cases with generative AI. However, such models often fail to connect the generated outputs and desired target concepts/preferences implied by the prompts. Current research addressing this limitation has largely focused on enh...

In multi-objective optimization, it becomes prohibitively difficult to cover the Pareto front (PF) as the number of points scales exponentially with the dimensionality of the objective space. The challenge is exacerbated in expensive optimization domains where evaluation data is at a premium. To overcome insufficient representations of PFs, Pareto...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a fast-growing research and development (R&D) discipline which is attracting increasing attention because it promises to bring vast benefits for consumers and businesses, with considerable benefits promised in productivity growth and innovation. To date, significant accomplishments have been reported in many areas th...

In multi-objective optimization, it becomes prohibitively difficult to cover the Pareto front (PF) as the number of points scales exponentially with the dimensionality of the objective space. The challenge is exacerbated in expensive optimization domains where evaluation data is at a premium. To overcome insufficient representations of PFs, Pareto...

Federated learning (FL) demonstrates its advantages in integrating distributed infrastructure, communication, computing and learning in a privacy-preserving manner. However, the robustness and capabilities of existing FL methods are challenged by limited and dynamic data and conditions, complexities including heterogeneities and uncertainties, and...

Current study on next point-of-interest (POI) recommendation mainly explores user sequential transitions with the fine-grained individual-user POI check-in trajectories only, which suffers from the severe check-in data sparsity issue. In fact, coarse-grained signals (i.e., region- and global-level check-ins) in such sparse check-ins would also bene...

We present a novel loss formulation for efficient learning of complex dynamics from governing physics, typically described by partial differential equations (PDEs), using physics-informed neural networks (PINNs). In our experiments, existing versions of PINNs are seen to learn poorly in many problems, especially for complex geometries, as it become...

Granger causality is a commonly used method for uncovering information flow and dependencies in a time series. Here, we introduce JGC (Jacobian Granger causality), a neural network-based approach to Granger causality using the Jacobian as a measure of variable importance, and propose a variable selection procedure for inferring Granger causal varia...

Recent developments in reinforcement learning have been able to derive optimal policies for sophisticated and capable agents, and shown to achieve human-level performance on a number of challenging tasks. Unfortunately, when it comes to multi-agent systems (MASs), complexities such as non-stationarity and partial observability bring new challenges...

Recently, one critical issue looms large in the field of recommender systems – there are no effective benchmarks for rigorous evaluation – which consequently leads to unreproducible evaluation and unfair comparison. We, therefore, conduct studies from the perspectives of practical theory and experiments, aiming at benchmarking recommendation for ri...

This paper introduces the use of evolutionary algorithms for solving differential equations. The solution is obtained by optimizing a deep neural network whose loss function is defined by the residual terms from the differential equations. Recent studies have used stochastic gradient descent (SGD) variants to train these physics-informed neural net...

Session-based recommendation (SR) has gained increasing attention in recent years. Quite a great amount of studies have been devoted to designing complex algorithms to improve recommendation performance, where deep learning methods account for the majority. However, most of these methods are black-box ones and ignore to provide moderate explanation...

Recent theoretical results have shown that instilling knowledge transfer into black-box optimization with Gaussian process surrogates, aka transfer Bayesian optimization, tightens cumulative regret bounds compared to the no-transfer case. Faster convergence under strict function evaluation budgets — often in the order of a hundred or fewer function...

Network embedding has shown promising performance in real-world applications. The network embedding typically lies in a continuous vector space, where storage and computation costs are high, especially in large-scale applications. This paper proposes more compact representation to fulfill the gap. The proposed discrete network embedding (DNE) lever...

In an era of pervasive digitalization, the growing volume and variety of data streams poses a new challenge to the efficient running of data-driven optimization algorithms. Targeting scalable multiobjective evolution under large-instance data, this article proposes the general idea of using subsampled small-data tasks as helpful minions (i.e.,...

Presents summaries of new books published on the topic of competitive intelligence.

Graph attention networks (GATs) are powerful tools for analyzing graph data from various real-world scenarios. To learn representations for downstream tasks, GATs generally attend to all neighbors of the central node when aggregating the features. In this paper, we show that a large portion of the neighbors are irrelevant to the central nodes in ma...

Contrastive learning has recently shown immense potential in unsupervised visual representation learning. Existing studies in this track mainly focus on intra-image invariance learning. The learning typically uses rich intra-image transformations to construct positive pairs and then maximizes agreement using a contrastive loss. The merits of inter-...

Current study on next POI recommendation mainly explores user sequential transitions with the fine-grained individual-user POI check-in trajectories only, which suffers from the severe check-in data sparsity issue. In fact, coarse-grained signals (i.e., region- and global-level check-ins) in such sparse check-ins would also benefit to augment user...

Current session-based recommender systems (SBRSs) mainly focus on maximizing recommendation accuracy, while few studies have been devoted to improve diversity beyond accuracy. Meanwhile, it is unclear how the accuracy-oriented SBRSs perform in terms of diversity. Besides, the asserted "trade-off" relationship between accuracy and diversity has been...

Despite the success enjoyed by the EMT search paradigm, it is worth noting that the implicit EMT algorithms introduced in Chaps. 3 and 4 are designed based on the unified solution representation, and the knowledge sharing across tasks for problem-solving is realized by the implicit genetic transfer in chromosomal crossover.

Besides solving the continuous optimization problems, this chapter introduces the evolutionary multitasking algorithm for solving the complex combinatorial optimization problems. In particular, in this chapter, we first present a generalized variant of vehicle routing problem with occasional drivers, i.e., Vehicle Routing Problem with Heterogeneous...

Besides solving large-scale single objective optimization problems, this chapter further demonstrate the multi-space evolutionary search for large-scale multi-objective optimization by using the evolutionary multitasking paradigm of MFO, termed MOEMT. The presented MOEMT first constructs several simplified problem spaces in a multi-variation manner...