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Real-world applications often involve irregular time series, for which the time intervals between successive observations are non-uniform. Irregularity across multiple features in a multi-variate time series further results in a different subset of features at any given time (i.e., asynchronicity). Existing pre-training schemes for time-series, however, often assume regularity of time series and make no special treatment of irregularity. We argue that such irregularity offers insight about domain property of the data—for example, frequency of hospital visits may signal patient health condition—that can guide representation learning. In this work, we propose PrimeNet to learn a self-supervised representation for irregular multivariate time-series. Specifically, we design a timesensitive contrastive learning and data reconstruction task to pre-train a model. Irregular time-series exhibits considerable variations in sampling density over time. Hence, our triplet generation strategy follows the density of the original data points, preserving its native irregularity. Moreover, the sampling density variation over time makes data reconstruction difficult for different regions. Therefore, we design a data masking technique that always masks a constant time duration to accommodate reconstruction for regions of different sampling density. We learn with these tasks using unlabeled data to build a pre-trained model and fine-tune on a downstream task with limited labeled data, in contrast with existing fully supervised approach for irregular time-series, requiring large amounts of labeled data. Experiment results show that PrimeNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on naturally irregular and asynchronous data from Healthcare and IoT applications for several downstream tasks, including classification, interpolation, and regression. 

Recent relation extraction (RE) works have shown encouraging improvements by conducting contrastive learning on silver labels generated by distant supervision before fine-tuning on gold labels. Existing methods typically assume all these silver labels are accurate and treat them equally; however, distant supervision is inevitably noisy–some silver labels are more reliable than others. In this paper, we propose fine-grained contrastive learning (FineCL) for RE, which leverages fine-grained information about which silver labels are and are not noisy to improve the quality of learned relationship representations for RE. We first assess the quality of silver labels via a simple and automatic approach we call “learning order denoising,” where we train a language model to learn these relations and record the order of learned training instances. We show that learning order largely corresponds to label accuracy–early-learned silver labels have, on average, more accurate labels than later-learned silver labels. Then, during pre-training, we increase the weights of accurate labels within a novel contrastive learning objective. Experiments on several RE benchmarks show that FineCL makes consistent and significant performance gains over state-of-the-art methods. 

We study the membership inference (MI) attack against classifiers, where the attacker's goal is to determine whether a data instance was used for training the classifier. Through systematic cataloging of existing MI attacks and extensive experimental evaluations of them, we find that a model's vulnerability to MI attacks is tightly related to the generalization gap -- the difference between training accuracy and test accuracy. We then propose a defense against MI attacks that aims to close the gap by intentionally reduces the training accuracy. More specifically, the training process attempts to match the training and validation accuracies, by means of a new {\em set regularizer} using the Maximum Mean Discrepancy between the softmax output empirical distributions of the training and validation sets. Our experimental results show that combining this approach with another simple defense (mix-up training) significantly improves state-of-the-art defense against MI attacks, with minimal impact on testing accuracy. 

Sensor metadata tagging, akin to the named entity recognition task, provides key contextual information (e.g., measurement type and location) about sensors for running smart building applications. Unfortunately, sensor metadata in different buildings often follows dis- tinct naming conventions. Therefore, learning a tagger currently requires extensive annotations on a per building basis. In this work, we propose a novel framework, SeNsER, which learns a sensor metadata tagger for a new building based on its raw metadata and some existing fully annotated building. It leverages the commonality between different buildings: At the character level, it employs bidirectional neural language models to capture the shared underlying patterns between two buildings and thus regularizes the feature learning process; At the word level, it leverages as features the k-mers existing in the fully annotated building. During inference, we further incorporate the information obtained from sources such as Wikipedia as prior knowledge. As a result, SeNsER shows promising results in extensive experiments on multiple real-world buildings.