In this work we address graph based semi-supervised learning using the theory of the spatial segregation of competitive systems. First, we define a discrete counterpart over connected graphs by using direct analogue of the corresponding competitive system. This model turns out doesn't have a unique solution as we expected. Nevertheless, we suggest gradient projected and regularization methods to reach some of the solutions. Then we focus on a slightly different model motivated from the recent numerical results on the spatial segregation of reaction-diffusion systems. In this case we show that the model has a unique solution and propose a novel classification algorithm based on it. Finally, we present numerical experiments showing the method is efficient and comparable to other semi-supervised learning algorithms at high and low label rates.
Annotating multi-class instances is a crucial task in the field of machine learning. Unfortunately, identifying the correct class label from a long sequence of candidate labels is time-consuming and laborious. To alleviate this problem, we design a novel labeling mechanism called stochastic label. In this setting, stochastic label includes two cases: 1) identify a correct class label from a small number of randomly given labels; 2) annotate the instance with None label when given labels do not contain correct class label. In this paper, we propose a novel suitable approach to learn from these stochastic labels. We obtain an unbiased estimator that utilizes less supervised information in stochastic labels to train a multi-class classifier. Additionally, it is theoretically justifiable by deriving the estimation error bound of the proposed method. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on widely-used benchmark datasets to validate the superiority of our method by comparing it with existing state-of-the-art methods.
We introduce a joint diffusion model that simultaneously learns meaningful internal representations fit for both generative and predictive tasks. Joint machine learning models that allow synthesizing and classifying data often offer uneven performance between those tasks or are unstable to train. In this work, we depart from a set of empirical observations that indicate the usefulness of internal representations built by contemporary deep diffusion-based generative models in both generative and predictive settings. We then introduce an extension of the vanilla diffusion model with a classifier that allows for stable joint training with shared parametrization between those objectives. The resulting joint diffusion model offers superior performance across various tasks, including generative modeling, semi-supervised classification, and domain adaptation.
Modality representation learning is an important problem for multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA), since the highly distinguishable representations can contribute to improving the analysis effect. Previous works of MSA have usually focused on multimodal fusion strategies, and the deep study of modal representation learning was given less attention. Recently, contrastive learning has been confirmed effective at endowing the learned representation with stronger discriminate ability. Inspired by this, we explore the improvement approaches of modality representation with contrastive learning in this study. To this end, we devise a three-stages framework with multi-view contrastive learning to refine representations for the specific objectives. At the first stage, for the improvement of unimodal representations, we employ the supervised contrastive learning to pull samples within the same class together while the other samples are pushed apart. At the second stage, a self-supervised contrastive learning is designed for the improvement of the distilled unimodal representations after cross-modal interaction. At last, we leverage again the supervised contrastive learning to enhance the fused multimodal representation. After all the contrast trainings, we next achieve the classification task based on frozen representations. We conduct experiments on three open datasets, and results show the advance of our model.
It is believed that Gradient Descent (GD) induces an implicit bias towards good generalization in training machine learning models. This paper provides a fine-grained analysis of the dynamics of GD for the matrix sensing problem, whose goal is to recover a low-rank ground-truth matrix from near-isotropic linear measurements. It is shown that GD with small initialization behaves similarly to the greedy low-rank learning heuristics (Li et al., 2020) and follows an incremental learning procedure (Gissin et al., 2019): GD sequentially learns solutions with increasing ranks until it recovers the ground truth matrix. Compared to existing works which only analyze the first learning phase for rank-1 solutions, our result provides characterizations for the whole learning process. Moreover, besides the over-parameterized regime that many prior works focused on, our analysis of the incremental learning procedure also applies to the under-parameterized regime. Finally, we conduct numerical experiments to confirm our theoretical findings.
The adaptive processing of structured data is a long-standing research topic in machine learning that investigates how to automatically learn a mapping from a structured input to outputs of various nature. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the adaptive processing of graphs, which led to the development of different neural network-based methodologies. In this thesis, we take a different route and develop a Bayesian Deep Learning framework for graph learning. The dissertation begins with a review of the principles over which most of the methods in the field are built, followed by a study on graph classification reproducibility issues. We then proceed to bridge the basic ideas of deep learning for graphs with the Bayesian world, by building our deep architectures in an incremental fashion. This framework allows us to consider graphs with discrete and continuous edge features, producing unsupervised embeddings rich enough to reach the state of the art on several classification tasks. Our approach is also amenable to a Bayesian nonparametric extension that automatizes the choice of almost all model's hyper-parameters. Two real-world applications demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning for graphs. The first concerns the prediction of information-theoretic quantities for molecular simulations with supervised neural models. After that, we exploit our Bayesian models to solve a malware-classification task while being robust to intra-procedural code obfuscation techniques. We conclude the dissertation with an attempt to blend the best of the neural and Bayesian worlds together. The resulting hybrid model is able to predict multimodal distributions conditioned on input graphs, with the consequent ability to model stochasticity and uncertainty better than most works. Overall, we aim to provide a Bayesian perspective into the articulated research field of deep learning for graphs.
Meta-learning extracts the common knowledge acquired from learning different tasks and uses it for unseen tasks. It demonstrates a clear advantage on tasks that have insufficient training data, e.g., few-shot learning. In most meta-learning methods, tasks are implicitly related via the shared model or optimizer. In this paper, we show that a meta-learner that explicitly relates tasks on a graph describing the relations of their output dimensions (e.g., classes) can significantly improve the performance of few-shot learning. This type of graph is usually free or cheap to obtain but has rarely been explored in previous works. We study the prototype based few-shot classification, in which a prototype is generated for each class, such that the nearest neighbor search between the prototypes produces an accurate classification. We introduce "Gated Propagation Network (GPN)", which learns to propagate messages between prototypes of different classes on the graph, so that learning the prototype of each class benefits from the data of other related classes. In GPN, an attention mechanism is used for the aggregation of messages from neighboring classes, and a gate is deployed to choose between the aggregated messages and the message from the class itself. GPN is trained on a sequence of tasks from many-shot to few-shot generated by subgraph sampling. During training, it is able to reuse and update previously achieved prototypes from the memory in a life-long learning cycle. In experiments, we change the training-test discrepancy and test task generation settings for thorough evaluations. GPN outperforms recent meta-learning methods on two benchmark datasets in all studied cases.
Deep learning has been shown successful in a number of domains, ranging from acoustics, images to natural language processing. However, applying deep learning to the ubiquitous graph data is non-trivial because of the unique characteristics of graphs. Recently, a significant amount of research efforts have been devoted to this area, greatly advancing graph analyzing techniques. In this survey, we comprehensively review different kinds of deep learning methods applied to graphs. We divide existing methods into three main categories: semi-supervised methods including Graph Neural Networks and Graph Convolutional Networks, unsupervised methods including Graph Autoencoders, and recent advancements including Graph Recurrent Neural Networks and Graph Reinforcement Learning. We then provide a comprehensive overview of these methods in a systematic manner following their history of developments. We also analyze the differences of these methods and how to composite different architectures. Finally, we briefly outline their applications and discuss potential future directions.
The potential of graph convolutional neural networks for the task of zero-shot learning has been demonstrated recently. These models are highly sample efficient as related concepts in the graph structure share statistical strength allowing generalization to new classes when faced with a lack of data. However, knowledge from distant nodes can get diluted when propagating through intermediate nodes, because current approaches to zero-shot learning use graph propagation schemes that perform Laplacian smoothing at each layer. We show that extensive smoothing does not help the task of regressing classifier weights in zero-shot learning. In order to still incorporate information from distant nodes and utilize the graph structure, we propose an Attentive Dense Graph Propagation Module (ADGPM). ADGPM allows us to exploit the hierarchical graph structure of the knowledge graph through additional connections. These connections are added based on a node's relationship to its ancestors and descendants and an attention scheme is further used to weigh their contribution depending on the distance to the node. Finally, we illustrate that finetuning of the feature representation after training the ADGPM leads to considerable improvements. Our method achieves competitive results, outperforming previous zero-shot learning approaches.
Medical image segmentation requires consensus ground truth segmentations to be derived from multiple expert annotations. A novel approach is proposed that obtains consensus segmentations from experts using graph cuts (GC) and semi supervised learning (SSL). Popular approaches use iterative Expectation Maximization (EM) to estimate the final annotation and quantify annotator's performance. Such techniques pose the risk of getting trapped in local minima. We propose a self consistency (SC) score to quantify annotator consistency using low level image features. SSL is used to predict missing annotations by considering global features and local image consistency. The SC score also serves as the penalty cost in a second order Markov random field (MRF) cost function optimized using graph cuts to derive the final consensus label. Graph cut obtains a global maximum without an iterative procedure. Experimental results on synthetic images, real data of Crohn's disease patients and retinal images show our final segmentation to be accurate and more consistent than competing methods.
We consider the problem of zero-shot recognition: learning a visual classifier for a category with zero training examples, just using the word embedding of the category and its relationship to other categories, which visual data are provided. The key to dealing with the unfamiliar or novel category is to transfer knowledge obtained from familiar classes to describe the unfamiliar class. In this paper, we build upon the recently introduced Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and propose an approach that uses both semantic embeddings and the categorical relationships to predict the classifiers. Given a learned knowledge graph (KG), our approach takes as input semantic embeddings for each node (representing visual category). After a series of graph convolutions, we predict the visual classifier for each category. During training, the visual classifiers for a few categories are given to learn the GCN parameters. At test time, these filters are used to predict the visual classifiers of unseen categories. We show that our approach is robust to noise in the KG. More importantly, our approach provides significant improvement in performance compared to the current state-of-the-art results (from 2 ~ 3% on some metrics to whopping 20% on a few).