The stochastic block model is a canonical random graph model for clustering and community detection on network-structured data. Decades of extensive study on the problem have established many profound results, among which the phase transition at the Kesten-Stigum threshold is particularly interesting both from a mathematical and an applied standpoint. It states that no estimator based on the network topology can perform substantially better than chance on sparse graphs if the model parameter is below certain threshold. Nevertheless, if we slightly extend the horizon to the ubiquitous semi-supervised setting, such a fundamental limitation will disappear completely. We prove that with arbitrary fraction of the labels revealed, the detection problem is feasible throughout the parameter domain. Moreover, we introduce two efficient algorithms, one combinatorial and one based on optimization, to integrate label information with graph structures. Our work brings a new perspective to stochastic model of networks and semidefinite program research.
Packet scheduling is a fundamental networking task that recently received renewed attention in the context of programmable data planes. Programmable packet scheduling systems such as those based on Push-In First-Out (PIFO) abstraction enabled flexible scheduling policies, but are too resource-expensive for large-scale line rate operation. This prompted research into practical programmable schedulers (e.g., SP-PIFO, AIFO) approximating PIFO behavior on regular hardware. Yet, their scalability remains limited due to extensive number of memory operations. To address this, we design an effective yet resource-efficient packet scheduler, Range-In First-Out (RIFO), which uses only three mutable memory cells and one FIFO queue per PIFO queue. RIFO is based on multi-criteria decision-making principles and uses small guaranteed admission buffers. Our large-scale simulations in Netbench demonstrate that despite using fewer resources, RIFO generally achieves competitive flow completion times across all studied workloads, and is especially effective in workloads with a significant share of large flows, reducing flow completion time up to 2.9x in Datamining workloads compared to state-of-the-art solutions. Our prototype implementation using P4 on Tofino switches requires only 650 lines of code, is scalable, and runs at line rate.
Graph clustering, which aims to divide the nodes in the graph into several distinct clusters, is a fundamental and challenging task. In recent years, deep graph clustering methods have been increasingly proposed and achieved promising performance. However, the corresponding survey paper is scarce and it is imminent to make a summary in this field. From this motivation, this paper makes the first comprehensive survey of deep graph clustering. Firstly, the detailed definition of deep graph clustering and the important baseline methods are introduced. Besides, the taxonomy of deep graph clustering methods is proposed based on four different criteria including graph type, network architecture, learning paradigm, and clustering method. In addition, through the careful analysis of the existing works, the challenges and opportunities from five perspectives are summarized. At last, the applications of deep graph clustering in four domains are presented. It is worth mentioning that a collection of state-of-the-art deep graph clustering methods including papers, codes, and datasets is available on GitHub. We hope this work will serve as a quick guide and help researchers to overcome challenges in this vibrant field.
Generative models, as an important family of statistical modeling, target learning the observed data distribution via generating new instances. Along with the rise of neural networks, deep generative models, such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) and generative adversarial network (GANs), have made tremendous progress in 2D image synthesis. Recently, researchers switch their attentions from the 2D space to the 3D space considering that 3D data better aligns with our physical world and hence enjoys great potential in practice. However, unlike a 2D image, which owns an efficient representation (i.e., pixel grid) by nature, representing 3D data could face far more challenges. Concretely, we would expect an ideal 3D representation to be capable enough to model shapes and appearances in details, and to be highly efficient so as to model high-resolution data with fast speed and low memory cost. However, existing 3D representations, such as point clouds, meshes, and recent neural fields, usually fail to meet the above requirements simultaneously. In this survey, we make a thorough review of the development of 3D generation, including 3D shape generation and 3D-aware image synthesis, from the perspectives of both algorithms and more importantly representations. We hope that our discussion could help the community track the evolution of this field and further spark some innovative ideas to advance this challenging task.
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
Graph neural networks generalize conventional neural networks to graph-structured data and have received widespread attention due to their impressive representation ability. In spite of the remarkable achievements, the performance of Euclidean models in graph-related learning is still bounded and limited by the representation ability of Euclidean geometry, especially for datasets with highly non-Euclidean latent anatomy. Recently, hyperbolic space has gained increasing popularity in processing graph data with tree-like structure and power-law distribution, owing to its exponential growth property. In this survey, we comprehensively revisit the technical details of the current hyperbolic graph neural networks, unifying them into a general framework and summarizing the variants of each component. More importantly, we present various HGNN-related applications. Last, we also identify several challenges, which potentially serve as guidelines for further flourishing the achievements of graph learning in hyperbolic spaces.
Object detection is a fundamental task in computer vision and image processing. Current deep learning based object detectors have been highly successful with abundant labeled data. But in real life, it is not guaranteed that each object category has enough labeled samples for training. These large object detectors are easy to overfit when the training data is limited. Therefore, it is necessary to introduce few-shot learning and zero-shot learning into object detection, which can be named low-shot object detection together. Low-Shot Object Detection (LSOD) aims to detect objects from a few or even zero labeled data, which can be categorized into few-shot object detection (FSOD) and zero-shot object detection (ZSD), respectively. This paper conducts a comprehensive survey for deep learning based FSOD and ZSD. First, this survey classifies methods for FSOD and ZSD into different categories and discusses the pros and cons of them. Second, this survey reviews dataset settings and evaluation metrics for FSOD and ZSD, then analyzes the performance of different methods on these benchmarks. Finally, this survey discusses future challenges and promising directions for FSOD and ZSD.
Deep neural models in recent years have been successful in almost every field, including extremely complex problem statements. However, these models are huge in size, with millions (and even billions) of parameters, thus demanding more heavy computation power and failing to be deployed on edge devices. Besides, the performance boost is highly dependent on redundant labeled data. To achieve faster speeds and to handle the problems caused by the lack of data, knowledge distillation (KD) has been proposed to transfer information learned from one model to another. KD is often characterized by the so-called `Student-Teacher' (S-T) learning framework and has been broadly applied in model compression and knowledge transfer. This paper is about KD and S-T learning, which are being actively studied in recent years. First, we aim to provide explanations of what KD is and how/why it works. Then, we provide a comprehensive survey on the recent progress of KD methods together with S-T frameworks typically for vision tasks. In general, we consider some fundamental questions that have been driving this research area and thoroughly generalize the research progress and technical details. Additionally, we systematically analyze the research status of KD in vision applications. Finally, we discuss the potentials and open challenges of existing methods and prospect the future directions of KD and S-T learning.
Deep generative modelling is a class of techniques that train deep neural networks to model the distribution of training samples. Research has fragmented into various interconnected approaches, each of which making trade-offs including run-time, diversity, and architectural restrictions. In particular, this compendium covers energy-based models, variational autoencoders, generative adversarial networks, autoregressive models, normalizing flows, in addition to numerous hybrid approaches. These techniques are drawn under a single cohesive framework, comparing and contrasting to explain the premises behind each, while reviewing current state-of-the-art advances and implementations.
We propose a novel attention gate (AG) model for medical imaging that automatically learns to focus on target structures of varying shapes and sizes. Models trained with AGs implicitly learn to suppress irrelevant regions in an input image while highlighting salient features useful for a specific task. This enables us to eliminate the necessity of using explicit external tissue/organ localisation modules of cascaded convolutional neural networks (CNNs). AGs can be easily integrated into standard CNN architectures such as the U-Net model with minimal computational overhead while increasing the model sensitivity and prediction accuracy. The proposed Attention U-Net architecture is evaluated on two large CT abdominal datasets for multi-class image segmentation. Experimental results show that AGs consistently improve the prediction performance of U-Net across different datasets and training sizes while preserving computational efficiency. The code for the proposed architecture is publicly available.
Learning similarity functions between image pairs with deep neural networks yields highly correlated activations of embeddings. In this work, we show how to improve the robustness of such embeddings by exploiting the independence within ensembles. To this end, we divide the last embedding layer of a deep network into an embedding ensemble and formulate training this ensemble as an online gradient boosting problem. Each learner receives a reweighted training sample from the previous learners. Further, we propose two loss functions which increase the diversity in our ensemble. These loss functions can be applied either for weight initialization or during training. Together, our contributions leverage large embedding sizes more effectively by significantly reducing correlation of the embedding and consequently increase retrieval accuracy of the embedding. Our method works with any differentiable loss function and does not introduce any additional parameters during test time. We evaluate our metric learning method on image retrieval tasks and show that it improves over state-of-the-art methods on the CUB 200-2011, Cars-196, Stanford Online Products, In-Shop Clothes Retrieval and VehicleID datasets.