Factor graph of an instance of a constraint satisfaction problem with n variables and m constraints is the bipartite graph between [m] and [n] describing which variable appears in which constraints. Thus, an instance of a CSP is completely defined by its factor graph and the list of predicates. We show inapproximability of Max-3-LIN over non-abelian groups (both in the perfect completeness case and in the imperfect completeness case), with the same inapproximability factor as in the general case, even when the factor graph is fixed. Along the way, we also show that these optimal hardness results hold even when we restrict the linear equations in the Max-3-LIN instances to the form x * y * z = g, where x, y, z are the variables and g is a group element. We use representation theory and Fourier analysis over non-abelian groups to analyze the reductions.
Effectively predicting molecular interactions has the potential to accelerate molecular dynamics by multiple orders of magnitude and thus revolutionize chemical simulations. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have recently shown great successes for this task, overtaking classical methods based on fixed molecular kernels. However, they still appear very limited from a theoretical perspective, since regular GNNs cannot distinguish certain types of graphs. In this work we close this gap between theory and practice. We show that GNNs with directed edge embeddings and two-hop message passing are indeed universal approximators for predictions that are invariant to translation, and equivariant to permutation and rotation. We then leverage these insights and multiple structural improvements to propose the geometric message passing neural network (GemNet). We demonstrate the benefits of the proposed changes in multiple ablation studies. GemNet outperforms previous models on the COLL, MD17, and OC20 datasets by 34%, 41%, and 20%, respectively, and performs especially well on the most challenging molecules. Our implementation is available online.
Group or cluster structure on explanatory variables in machine learning problems is a very general phenomenon, which has attracted broad interest from practitioners and theoreticians alike. In this work we contribute an approach to learning under such group structure, that does not require prior information on the group identities. Our paradigm is motivated by the Laplacian geometry of an underlying network with a related community structure, and proceeds by directly incorporating this into a penalty that is effectively computed via a heat flow-based local network dynamics. In fact, we demonstrate a procedure to construct such a network based on the available data. Notably, we dispense with computationally intensive pre-processing involving clustering of variables, spectral or otherwise. Our technique is underpinned by rigorous theorems that guarantee its effective performance and provide bounds on its sample complexity. In particular, in a wide range of settings, it provably suffices to run the heat flow dynamics for time that is only logarithmic in the problem dimensions. We explore in detail the interfaces of our approach with key statistical physics models in network science, such as the Gaussian Free Field and the Stochastic Block Model. We validate our approach by successful applications to real-world data from a wide array of application domains, including computer science, genetics, climatology and economics. Our work raises the possibility of applying similar diffusion-based techniques to classical learning tasks, exploiting the interplay between geometric, dynamical and stochastic structures underlying the data.
This paper studies the inference of the regression coefficient matrix under multivariate response linear regressions in the presence of hidden variables. A novel procedure for constructing confidence intervals of entries of the coefficient matrix is proposed. Our method first utilizes the multivariate nature of the responses by estimating and adjusting the hidden effect to construct an initial estimator of the coefficient matrix. By further deploying a low-dimensional projection procedure to reduce the bias introduced by the regularization in the previous step, a refined estimator is proposed and shown to be asymptotically normal. The asymptotic variance of the resulting estimator is derived with closed-form expression and can be consistently estimated. In addition, we propose a testing procedure for the existence of hidden effects and provide its theoretical justification. Both our procedures and their analyses are valid even when the feature dimension and the number of responses exceed the sample size. Our results are further backed up via extensive simulations and a real data analysis.
In this work we propose and unify classes of different models for information propagation over graphs. In a first class, propagation is modeled as a wave which emanates from a set of known nodes at an initial time, to all other unknown nodes at later times with an ordering determined by the time at which the information wave front reaches nodes. A second class of models is based on the notion of a travel time along paths between nodes. The time of information propagation from an initial known set of nodes to a node is defined as the minimum of a generalized travel time over subsets of all admissible paths. A final class is given by imposing a local equation of an eikonal form at each unknown node, with boundary conditions at the known nodes. The solution value of the local equation at a node is coupled the neighbouring nodes with smaller solution values. We provide precise formulations of the model classes in this graph setting, and prove equivalences between them. Motivated by the connection between first arrival time model and the eikonal equation in the continuum setting, we demonstrate that for graphs in the particular form of grids in Euclidean space mean field limits under grid refinement of certain graph models lead to Hamilton-Jacobi PDEs. For a specific parameter setting, we demonstrate that the solution on the grid approximates the Euclidean distance.
We introduce a tensor-based model of shared representation for meta-learning from a diverse set of tasks. Prior works on learning linear representations for meta-learning assume that there is a common shared representation across different tasks, and do not consider the additional task-specific observable side information. In this work, we model the meta-parameter through an order-$3$ tensor, which can adapt to the observed task features of the task. We propose two methods to estimate the underlying tensor. The first method solves a tensor regression problem and works under natural assumptions on the data generating process. The second method uses the method of moments under additional distributional assumptions and has an improved sample complexity in terms of the number of tasks. We also focus on the meta-test phase, and consider estimating task-specific parameters on a new task. Substituting the estimated tensor from the first step allows us estimating the task-specific parameters with very few samples of the new task, thereby showing the benefits of learning tensor representations for meta-learning. Finally, through simulation and several real-world datasets, we evaluate our methods and show that it improves over previous linear models of shared representations for meta-learning.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are typically applied to static graphs that are assumed to be known upfront. This static input structure is often informed purely by insight of the machine learning practitioner, and might not be optimal for the actual task the GNN is solving. In absence of reliable domain expertise, one might resort to inferring the latent graph structure, which is often difficult due to the vast search space of possible graphs. Here we introduce Pointer Graph Networks (PGNs) which augment sets or graphs with additional inferred edges for improved model generalisation ability. PGNs allow each node to dynamically point to another node, followed by message passing over these pointers. The sparsity of this adaptable graph structure makes learning tractable while still being sufficiently expressive to simulate complex algorithms. Critically, the pointing mechanism is directly supervised to model long-term sequences of operations on classical data structures, incorporating useful structural inductive biases from theoretical computer science. Qualitatively, we demonstrate that PGNs can learn parallelisable variants of pointer-based data structures, namely disjoint set unions and link/cut trees. PGNs generalise out-of-distribution to 5x larger test inputs on dynamic graph connectivity tasks, outperforming unrestricted GNNs and Deep Sets.
Node classification is an important problem in graph data management. It is commonly solved by various label propagation methods that work iteratively starting from a few labeled seed nodes. For graphs with arbitrary compatibilities between classes, these methods crucially depend on knowing the compatibility matrix that must be provided by either domain experts or heuristics. Can we instead directly estimate the correct compatibilities from a sparsely labeled graph in a principled and scalable way? We answer this question affirmatively and suggest a method called distant compatibility estimation that works even on extremely sparsely labeled graphs (e.g., 1 in 10,000 nodes is labeled) in a fraction of the time it later takes to label the remaining nodes. Our approach first creates multiple factorized graph representations (with size independent of the graph) and then performs estimation on these smaller graph sketches. We define algebraic amplification as the more general idea of leveraging algebraic properties of an algorithm's update equations to amplify sparse signals. We show that our estimator is by orders of magnitude faster than an alternative approach and that the end-to-end classification accuracy is comparable to using gold standard compatibilities. This makes it a cheap preprocessing step for any existing label propagation method and removes the current dependence on heuristics.
Graph embedding is an important approach for graph analysis tasks such as node classification and link prediction. The goal of graph embedding is to find a low dimensional representation of graph nodes that preserves the graph information. Recent methods like Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) try to consider node attributes (if available) besides node relations and learn node embeddings for unsupervised and semi-supervised tasks on graphs. On the other hand, multi-layer graph analysis has been received attention recently. However, the existing methods for multi-layer graph embedding cannot incorporate all available information (like node attributes). Moreover, most of them consider either type of nodes or type of edges, and they do not treat within and between layer edges differently. In this paper, we propose a method called MGCN that utilizes the GCN for multi-layer graphs. MGCN embeds nodes of multi-layer graphs using both within and between layers relations and nodes attributes. We evaluate our method on the semi-supervised node classification task. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method to other multi-layer and single-layer competitors and also show the positive effect of using cross-layer edges.
Graph Neural Networks (GNN) come in many flavors, but should always be either invariant (permutation of the nodes of the input graph does not affect the output) or equivariant (permutation of the input permutes the output). In this paper, we consider a specific class of invariant and equivariant networks, for which we prove new universality theorems. More precisely, we consider networks with a single hidden layer, obtained by summing channels formed by applying an equivariant linear operator, a pointwise non-linearity and either an invariant or equivariant linear operator. Recently, Maron et al. (2019) showed that by allowing higher-order tensorization inside the network, universal invariant GNNs can be obtained. As a first contribution, we propose an alternative proof of this result, which relies on the Stone-Weierstrass theorem for algebra of real-valued functions. Our main contribution is then an extension of this result to the equivariant case, which appears in many practical applications but has been less studied from a theoretical point of view. The proof relies on a new generalized Stone-Weierstrass theorem for algebra of equivariant functions, which is of independent interest. Finally, unlike many previous settings that consider a fixed number of nodes, our results show that a GNN defined by a single set of parameters can approximate uniformly well a function defined on graphs of varying size.
Dialog is an effective way to exchange information, but subtle details and nuances are extremely important. While significant progress has paved a path to address visual dialog with algorithms, details and nuances remain a challenge. Attention mechanisms have demonstrated compelling results to extract details in visual question answering and also provide a convincing framework for visual dialog due to their interpretability and effectiveness. However, the many data utilities that accompany visual dialog challenge existing attention techniques. We address this issue and develop a general attention mechanism for visual dialog which operates on any number of data utilities. To this end, we design a factor graph based attention mechanism which combines any number of utility representations. We illustrate the applicability of the proposed approach on the challenging and recently introduced VisDial datasets, outperforming recent state-of-the-art methods by 1.1% for VisDial0.9 and by 2% for VisDial1.0 on MRR. Our ensemble model improved the MRR score on VisDial1.0 by more than 6%.