Inspired by recent research that recommends starting neural networks training with large learning rates (LRs) to achieve the best generalization, we explore this hypothesis in detail. Our study clarifies the initial LR ranges that provide optimal results for subsequent training with a small LR or weight averaging. We find that these ranges are in fact significantly narrower than generally assumed. We conduct our main experiments in a simplified setup that allows precise control of the learning rate hyperparameter and validate our key findings in a more practical setting.
\textbf{Objectives}: We aimed to investigate how errors from automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems affect dementia classification accuracy, specifically in the ``Cookie Theft'' picture description task. We aimed to assess whether imperfect ASR-generated transcripts could provide valuable information for distinguishing between language samples from cognitively healthy individuals and those with Alzheimer's disease (AD). \textbf{Methods}: We conducted experiments using various ASR models, refining their transcripts with post-editing techniques. Both these imperfect ASR transcripts and manually transcribed ones were used as inputs for the downstream dementia classification. We conducted comprehensive error analysis to compare model performance and assess ASR-generated transcript effectiveness in dementia classification. \textbf{Results}: Imperfect ASR-generated transcripts surprisingly outperformed manual transcription for distinguishing between individuals with AD and those without in the ``Cookie Theft'' task. These ASR-based models surpassed the previous state-of-the-art approach, indicating that ASR errors may contain valuable cues related to dementia. The synergy between ASR and classification models improved overall accuracy in dementia classification. \textbf{Conclusion}: Imperfect ASR transcripts effectively capture linguistic anomalies linked to dementia, improving accuracy in classification tasks. This synergy between ASR and classification models underscores ASR's potential as a valuable tool in assessing cognitive impairment and related clinical applications.
Models trained with empirical risk minimization (ERM) are known to learn to rely on spurious features, i.e., their prediction is based on undesired auxiliary features which are strongly correlated with class labels but lack causal reasoning. This behavior particularly degrades accuracy in groups of samples of the correlated class that are missing the spurious feature or samples of the opposite class but with the spurious feature present. The recently proposed Deep Feature Reweighting (DFR) method improves accuracy of these worst groups. Based on the main argument that ERM mods can learn core features sufficiently well, DFR only needs to retrain the last layer of the classification model with a small group-balanced data set. In this work, we examine the applicability of DFR to realistic data in the medical domain. Furthermore, we investigate the reasoning behind the effectiveness of last-layer retraining and show that even though DFR has the potential to improve the accuracy of the worst group, it remains susceptible to spurious correlations.
Temporal graph neural networks have shown promising results in learning inductive representations by automatically extracting temporal patterns. However, previous works often rely on complex memory modules or inefficient random walk methods to construct temporal representations. To address these limitations, we present an efficient yet effective attention-based encoder that leverages temporal edge encodings and window-based subgraph sampling to generate task-agnostic embeddings. Moreover, we propose a joint-embedding architecture using non-contrastive SSL to learn rich temporal embeddings without labels. Experimental results on 7 benchmark datasets indicate that on average, our model outperforms SoTA baselines on the future link prediction task by 4.23% for the transductive setting and 3.30% for the inductive setting while only requiring 5-10x less training/inference time. Lastly, different aspects of the proposed framework are investigated through experimental analysis and ablation studies. The code is publicly available at //github.com/huawei-noah/noah-research/tree/master/graph_atlas.
We present a benchmark for assessing the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to discern intercardinal directions between geographic locations and apply it to three prominent LLMs: GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Llama-2. This benchmark specifically evaluates whether LLMs exhibit a hierarchical spatial bias similar to humans, where judgments about individual locations' spatial relationships are influenced by the perceived relationships of the larger groups that contain them. To investigate this, we formulated 14 questions focusing on well-known American cities. Seven questions were designed to challenge the LLMs with scenarios potentially influenced by the orientation of larger geographical units, such as states or countries, while the remaining seven targeted locations less susceptible to such hierarchical categorization. Among the tested models, GPT-4 exhibited superior performance with 55.3% accuracy, followed by GPT-3.5 at 47.3%, and Llama-2 at 44.7%. The models showed significantly reduced accuracy on tasks with suspected hierarchical bias. For example, GPT-4's accuracy dropped to 32.9% on these tasks, compared to 85.7% on others. Despite these inaccuracies, the models identified the nearest cardinal direction in most cases, suggesting associative learning, embodying human-like misconceptions. We discuss the potential of text-based data representing geographic relationships directly to improve the spatial reasoning capabilities of LLMs.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a type of deep learning models that learning over graphs, and have been successfully applied in many domains. Despite the effectiveness of GNNs, it is still challenging for GNNs to efficiently scale to large graphs. As a remedy, distributed computing becomes a promising solution of training large-scale GNNs, since it is able to provide abundant computing resources. However, the dependency of graph structure increases the difficulty of achieving high-efficiency distributed GNN training, which suffers from the massive communication and workload imbalance. In recent years, many efforts have been made on distributed GNN training, and an array of training algorithms and systems have been proposed. Yet, there is a lack of systematic review on the optimization techniques from graph processing to distributed execution. In this survey, we analyze three major challenges in distributed GNN training that are massive feature communication, the loss of model accuracy and workload imbalance. Then we introduce a new taxonomy for the optimization techniques in distributed GNN training that address the above challenges. The new taxonomy classifies existing techniques into four categories that are GNN data partition, GNN batch generation, GNN execution model, and GNN communication protocol.We carefully discuss the techniques in each category. In the end, we summarize existing distributed GNN systems for multi-GPUs, GPU-clusters and CPU-clusters, respectively, and give a discussion about the future direction on scalable GNNs.
Feature attribution methods are popular in interpretable machine learning. These methods compute the attribution of each input feature to represent its importance, but there is no consensus on the definition of "attribution", leading to many competing methods with little systematic evaluation, complicated in particular by the lack of ground truth attribution. To address this, we propose a dataset modification procedure to induce such ground truth. Using this procedure, we evaluate three common methods: saliency maps, rationales, and attentions. We identify several deficiencies and add new perspectives to the growing body of evidence questioning the correctness and reliability of these methods applied on datasets in the wild. We further discuss possible avenues for remedy and recommend new attribution methods to be tested against ground truth before deployment. The code is available at \url{//github.com/YilunZhou/feature-attribution-evaluation}.
Catastrophic forgetting refers to the tendency that a neural network "forgets" the previous learned knowledge upon learning new tasks. Prior methods have been focused on overcoming this problem on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), where the input samples like images lie in a grid domain, but have largely overlooked graph neural networks (GNNs) that handle non-grid data. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme dedicated to overcoming catastrophic forgetting problem and hence strengthen continual learning in GNNs. At the heart of our approach is a generic module, termed as topology-aware weight preserving~(TWP), applicable to arbitrary form of GNNs in a plug-and-play fashion. Unlike the main stream of CNN-based continual learning methods that rely on solely slowing down the updates of parameters important to the downstream task, TWP explicitly explores the local structures of the input graph, and attempts to stabilize the parameters playing pivotal roles in the topological aggregation. We evaluate TWP on different GNN backbones over several datasets, and demonstrate that it yields performances superior to the state of the art. Code is publicly available at \url{//github.com/hhliu79/TWP}.
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have recently become one of the most powerful tools for graph analytics tasks in numerous applications, ranging from social networks and natural language processing to bioinformatics and chemoinformatics, thanks to their ability to capture the complex relationships between concepts. At present, the vast majority of GCNs use a neighborhood aggregation framework to learn a continuous and compact vector, then performing a pooling operation to generalize graph embedding for the classification task. These approaches have two disadvantages in the graph classification task: (1)when only the largest sub-graph structure ($k$-hop neighbor) is used for neighborhood aggregation, a large amount of early-stage information is lost during the graph convolution step; (2) simple average/sum pooling or max pooling utilized, which loses the characteristics of each node and the topology between nodes. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called, dual attention graph convolutional networks (DAGCN) to address these problems. DAGCN automatically learns the importance of neighbors at different hops using a novel attention graph convolution layer, and then employs a second attention component, a self-attention pooling layer, to generalize the graph representation from the various aspects of a matrix graph embedding. The dual attention network is trained in an end-to-end manner for the graph classification task. We compare our model with state-of-the-art graph kernels and other deep learning methods. The experimental results show that our framework not only outperforms other baselines but also achieves a better rate of convergence.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for representation learning of graphs broadly follow a neighborhood aggregation framework, where the representation vector of a node is computed by recursively aggregating and transforming feature vectors of its neighboring nodes. Many GNN variants have been proposed and have achieved state-of-the-art results on both node and graph classification tasks. However, despite GNNs revolutionizing graph representation learning, there is limited understanding of their representational properties and limitations. Here, we present a theoretical framework for analyzing the expressive power of GNNs in capturing different graph structures. Our results characterize the discriminative power of popular GNN variants, such as Graph Convolutional Networks and GraphSAGE, and show that they cannot learn to distinguish certain simple graph structures. We then develop a simple architecture that is provably the most expressive among the class of GNNs and is as powerful as the Weisfeiler-Lehman graph isomorphism test. We empirically validate our theoretical findings on a number of graph classification benchmarks, and demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have gained significant traction in the field of machine learning, particularly due to their high accuracy in visual recognition. Recent works have pushed the performance of GPU implementations of CNNs to significantly improve their classification and training times. With these improvements, many frameworks have become available for implementing CNNs on both CPUs and GPUs, with no support for FPGA implementations. In this work we present a modified version of the popular CNN framework Caffe, with FPGA support. This allows for classification using CNN models and specialized FPGA implementations with the flexibility of reprogramming the device when necessary, seamless memory transactions between host and device, simple-to-use test benches, and the ability to create pipelined layer implementations. To validate the framework, we use the Xilinx SDAccel environment to implement an FPGA-based Winograd convolution engine and show that the FPGA layer can be used alongside other layers running on a host processor to run several popular CNNs (AlexNet, GoogleNet, VGG A, Overfeat). The results show that our framework achieves 50 GFLOPS across 3x3 convolutions in the benchmarks. This is achieved within a practical framework, which will aid in future development of FPGA-based CNNs.