We propose a general method for growing neural network with shared parameter by matching trained network to new input. By leveraging Hoeffding's inequality, we provide a theoretical base for improving performance by adding subnetwork to existing network. With the theoretical base of adding new subnetwork, we implement a matching method to apply trained subnetwork of existing network to new input. Our method has shown the ability to improve performance with higher parameter efficiency. It can also be applied to trans-task case and realize transfer learning by changing the combination of subnetworks without training on new task.
Distributed machine learning (ML) can bring more computational resources to bear than single-machine learning, thus enabling reductions in training time. Distributed learning partitions models and data over many machines, allowing model and dataset sizes beyond the available compute power and memory of a single machine. In practice though, distributed ML is challenging when distribution is mandatory, rather than chosen by the practitioner. In such scenarios, data could unavoidably be separated among workers due to limited memory capacity per worker or even because of data privacy issues. There, existing distributed methods will utterly fail due to dominant transfer costs across workers, or do not even apply. We propose a new approach to distributed fully connected neural network learning, called independent subnet training (IST), to handle these cases. In IST, the original network is decomposed into a set of narrow subnetworks with the same depth. These subnetworks are then trained locally before parameters are exchanged to produce new subnets and the training cycle repeats. Such a naturally "model parallel" approach limits memory usage by storing only a portion of network parameters on each device. Additionally, no requirements exist for sharing data between workers (i.e., subnet training is local and independent) and communication volume and frequency are reduced by decomposing the original network into independent subnets. These properties of IST can cope with issues due to distributed data, slow interconnects, or limited device memory, making IST a suitable approach for cases of mandatory distribution. We show experimentally that IST results in training times that are much lower than common distributed learning approaches.
Invertible neural networks (INNs) are neural network architectures with invertibility by design. Thanks to their invertibility and the tractability of Jacobian, INNs have various machine learning applications such as probabilistic modeling, generative modeling, and representation learning. However, their attractive properties often come at the cost of restricting the layer designs, which poses a question on their representation power: can we use these models to approximate sufficiently diverse functions? To answer this question, we have developed a general theoretical framework to investigate the representation power of INNs, building on a structure theorem of differential geometry. The framework simplifies the approximation problem of diffeomorphisms, which enables us to show the universal approximation properties of INNs. We apply the framework to two representative classes of INNs, namely Coupling-Flow-based INNs (CF-INNs) and Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs), and elucidate their high representation power despite the restrictions on their architectures.
Deep learning occupies an undisputed dominance in crowd counting. In this paper, we propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture called SegCrowdNet. Despite the complex background in crowd scenes, the proposeSegCrowdNet still adaptively highlights the human head region and suppresses the non-head region by segmentation. With the guidance of an attention mechanism, the proposed SegCrowdNet pays more attention to the human head region and automatically encodes the highly refined density map. The crowd count can be obtained by integrating the density map. To adapt the variation of crowd counts, SegCrowdNet intelligently classifies the crowd count of each image into several groups. In addition, the multi-scale features are learned and extracted in the proposed SegCrowdNet to overcome the scale variations of the crowd. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted on four challenging datasets. The results demonstrate that our proposed SegCrowdNet achieves excellent performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
Crowd counting is a challenging problem due to the scene complexity and scale variation. Although deep learning has achieved great improvement in crowd counting, scene complexity affects the judgement of these methods and they usually regard some objects as people mistakenly; causing potentially enormous errors in the crowd counting result. To address the problem, we propose a novel end-to-end model called Crowd Attention Convolutional Neural Network (CAT-CNN). Our CAT-CNN can adaptively assess the importance of a human head at each pixel location by automatically encoding a confidence map. With the guidance of the confidence map, the position of human head in estimated density map gets more attention to encode the final density map, which can avoid enormous misjudgements effectively. The crowd count can be obtained by integrating the final density map. To encode a highly refined density map, the total crowd count of each image is classified in a designed classification task and we first explicitly map the prior of the population-level category to feature maps. To verify the efficiency of our proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted on three highly challenging datasets. Results establish the superiority of our method over many state-of-the-art methods.
Recently, a considerable literature has grown up around the theme of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). How to effectively leverage the rich structural information in complex graphs, such as knowledge graphs with heterogeneous types of entities and relations, is a primary open challenge in the field. Most GCN methods are either restricted to graphs with a homogeneous type of edges (e.g., citation links only), or focusing on representation learning for nodes only instead of jointly propagating and updating the embeddings of both nodes and edges for target-driven objectives. This paper addresses these limitations by proposing a novel framework, namely the Knowledge Embedding based Graph Convolutional Network (KE-GCN), which combines the power of GCNs in graph-based belief propagation and the strengths of advanced knowledge embedding (a.k.a. knowledge graph embedding) methods, and goes beyond. Our theoretical analysis shows that KE-GCN offers an elegant unification of several well-known GCN methods as specific cases, with a new perspective of graph convolution. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show the advantageous performance of KE-GCN over strong baseline methods in the tasks of knowledge graph alignment and entity classification.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have proven to be useful for many different practical applications. However, many existing GNN models have implicitly assumed homophily among the nodes connected in the graph, and therefore have largely overlooked the important setting of heterophily, where most connected nodes are from different classes. In this work, we propose a novel framework called CPGNN that generalizes GNNs for graphs with either homophily or heterophily. The proposed framework incorporates an interpretable compatibility matrix for modeling the heterophily or homophily level in the graph, which can be learned in an end-to-end fashion, enabling it to go beyond the assumption of strong homophily. Theoretically, we show that replacing the compatibility matrix in our framework with the identity (which represents pure homophily) reduces to GCN. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in more realistic and challenging experimental settings with significantly less training data compared to previous works: CPGNN variants achieve state-of-the-art results in heterophily settings with or without contextual node features, while maintaining comparable performance in homophily settings.
For deploying a deep learning model into production, it needs to be both accurate and compact to meet the latency and memory constraints. This usually results in a network that is deep (to ensure performance) and yet thin (to improve computational efficiency). In this paper, we propose an efficient method to train a deep thin network with a theoretic guarantee. Our method is motivated by model compression. It consists of three stages. In the first stage, we sufficiently widen the deep thin network and train it until convergence. In the second stage, we use this well-trained deep wide network to warm up (or initialize) the original deep thin network. This is achieved by letting the thin network imitate the immediate outputs of the wide network from layer to layer. In the last stage, we further fine tune this well initialized deep thin network. The theoretical guarantee is established by using mean field analysis, which shows the advantage of layerwise imitation over traditional training deep thin networks from scratch by backpropagation. We also conduct large-scale empirical experiments to validate our approach. By training with our method, ResNet50 can outperform ResNet101, and BERT_BASE can be comparable with BERT_LARGE, where both the latter models are trained via the standard training procedures as in the literature.
Deep learning methods for graphs achieve remarkable performance on many node-level and graph-level prediction tasks. However, despite the proliferation of the methods and their success, prevailing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) neglect subgraphs, rendering subgraph prediction tasks challenging to tackle in many impactful applications. Further, subgraph prediction tasks present several unique challenges, because subgraphs can have non-trivial internal topology, but also carry a notion of position and external connectivity information relative to the underlying graph in which they exist. Here, we introduce SUB-GNN, a subgraph neural network to learn disentangled subgraph representations. In particular, we propose a novel subgraph routing mechanism that propagates neural messages between the subgraph's components and randomly sampled anchor patches from the underlying graph, yielding highly accurate subgraph representations. SUB-GNN specifies three channels, each designed to capture a distinct aspect of subgraph structure, and we provide empirical evidence that the channels encode their intended properties. We design a series of new synthetic and real-world subgraph datasets. Empirical results for subgraph classification on eight datasets show that SUB-GNN achieves considerable performance gains, outperforming strong baseline methods, including node-level and graph-level GNNs, by 12.4% over the strongest baseline. SUB-GNN performs exceptionally well on challenging biomedical datasets when subgraphs have complex topology and even comprise multiple disconnected components.
Spectral clustering (SC) is a popular clustering technique to find strongly connected communities on a graph. SC can be used in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to implement pooling operations that aggregate nodes belonging to the same cluster. However, the eigendecomposition of the Laplacian is expensive and, since clustering results are graph-specific, pooling methods based on SC must perform a new optimization for each new sample. In this paper, we propose a graph clustering approach that addresses these limitations of SC. We formulate a continuous relaxation of the normalized minCUT problem and train a GNN to compute cluster assignments that minimize this objective. Our GNN-based implementation is differentiable, does not require to compute the spectral decomposition, and learns a clustering function that can be quickly evaluated on out-of-sample graphs. From the proposed clustering method, we design a graph pooling operator that overcomes some important limitations of state-of-the-art graph pooling techniques and achieves the best performance in several supervised and unsupervised tasks.
How can we estimate the importance of nodes in a knowledge graph (KG)? A KG is a multi-relational graph that has proven valuable for many tasks including question answering and semantic search. In this paper, we present GENI, a method for tackling the problem of estimating node importance in KGs, which enables several downstream applications such as item recommendation and resource allocation. While a number of approaches have been developed to address this problem for general graphs, they do not fully utilize information available in KGs, or lack flexibility needed to model complex relationship between entities and their importance. To address these limitations, we explore supervised machine learning algorithms. In particular, building upon recent advancement of graph neural networks (GNNs), we develop GENI, a GNN-based method designed to deal with distinctive challenges involved with predicting node importance in KGs. Our method performs an aggregation of importance scores instead of aggregating node embeddings via predicate-aware attention mechanism and flexible centrality adjustment. In our evaluation of GENI and existing methods on predicting node importance in real-world KGs with different characteristics, GENI achieves 5-17% higher NDCG@100 than the state of the art.