Data generation is recognized as a potent strategy for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) pertaining semantic segmentation in adverse weathers. Nevertheless, these adverse weather scenarios encompass multiple possibilities, and high-fidelity data synthesis with controllable weather is under-researched in previous UDA works. The recent strides in large-scale text-to-image diffusion models (DM) have ushered in a novel avenue for research, enabling the generation of realistic images conditioned on semantic labels. This capability proves instrumental for cross-domain data synthesis from source to target domain owing to their shared label space. Thus, source domain labels can be paired with those generated pseudo target data for training UDA. However, from the UDA perspective, there exists several challenges for DM training: (i) ground-truth labels from target domain are missing; (ii) the prompt generator may produce vague or noisy descriptions of images from adverse weathers; (iii) existing arts often struggle to well handle the complex scene structure and geometry of urban scenes when conditioned only on semantic labels. To tackle the above issues, we propose ControlUDA, a diffusion-assisted framework tailored for UDA segmentation under adverse weather conditions. It first leverages target prior from a pre-trained segmentor for tuning the DM, compensating the missing target domain labels; It also contains UDAControlNet, a condition-fused multi-scale and prompt-enhanced network targeted at high-fidelity data generation in adverse weathers. Training UDA with our generated data brings the model performances to a new milestone (72.0 mIoU) on the popular Cityscapes-to-ACDC benchmark for adverse weathers. Furthermore, ControlUDA helps to achieve good model generalizability on unseen data.
Core computations in Graph Neural Network (GNN) training and inference are often mapped to sparse matrix operations such as sparse-dense matrix multiplication (SpMM). These sparse operations are harder to optimize by manual tuning because their performance depends significantly on the sparsity of input graphs, GNN models, and computing platforms. To address this challenge, we present iSpLib, a PyTorch-based C++ library equipped with auto-tuned sparse operations. iSpLib expedites GNN training with a cache-enabled backpropagation that stores intermediate matrices in local caches. The library offers a user-friendly Python plug-in that allows users to take advantage of our optimized PyTorch operations out-of-the-box for any existing linear algebra-based PyTorch implementation of popular GNNs (Graph Convolution Network, GraphSAGE, Graph Inference Network, etc.) with only two lines of additional code. We demonstrate that iSpLib obtains up to 27x overall training speedup compared to the equivalent PyTorch 2.1.0 and PyTorch Geometric 2.4.0 implementations on the CPU. Our library is publicly available at //github.com/HipGraph/iSpLib (//doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10806511).
Aside from graph neural networks (GNNs) attracting significant attention as a powerful framework revolutionizing graph representation learning, there has been an increasing demand for explaining GNN models. Although various explanation methods for GNNs have been developed, most studies have focused on instance-level explanations, which produce explanations tailored to a given graph instance. In our study, we propose Prototype-bAsed GNN-Explainer (PAGE), a novel model-level GNN explanation method that explains what the underlying GNN model has learned for graph classification by discovering human-interpretable prototype graphs. Our method produces explanations for a given class, thus being capable of offering more concise and comprehensive explanations than those of instance-level explanations. First, PAGE selects embeddings of class-discriminative input graphs on the graph-level embedding space after clustering them. Then, PAGE discovers a common subgraph pattern by iteratively searching for high matching node tuples using node-level embeddings via a prototype scoring function, thereby yielding a prototype graph as our explanation. Using six graph classification datasets, we demonstrate that PAGE qualitatively and quantitatively outperforms the state-of-the-art model-level explanation method. We also carry out systematic experimental studies by demonstrating the relationship between PAGE and instance-level explanation methods, the robustness of PAGE to input data scarce environments, and the computational efficiency of the proposed prototype scoring function in PAGE.
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has substantially influenced natural language processing, demonstrating exceptional results across various tasks. In this study, we employ ``Introspective Tips" to facilitate LLMs in self-optimizing their decision-making. By introspectively examining trajectories, LLM refines its policy by generating succinct and valuable tips. Our method enhances the agent's performance in both few-shot and zero-shot learning situations by considering three essential scenarios: learning from the agent's past experiences, integrating expert demonstrations, and generalizing across diverse games. Importantly, we accomplish these improvements without fine-tuning the LLM parameters; rather, we adjust the prompt to generalize insights from the three aforementioned situations. Our framework not only supports but also emphasizes the advantage of employing LLM in in-contxt decision-making. Experiments involving over 100 games in TextWorld illustrate the superior performance of our approach.
The incredible development of federated learning (FL) has benefited various tasks in the domains of computer vision and natural language processing, and the existing frameworks such as TFF and FATE has made the deployment easy in real-world applications. However, federated graph learning (FGL), even though graph data are prevalent, has not been well supported due to its unique characteristics and requirements. The lack of FGL-related framework increases the efforts for accomplishing reproducible research and deploying in real-world applications. Motivated by such strong demand, in this paper, we first discuss the challenges in creating an easy-to-use FGL package and accordingly present our implemented package FederatedScope-GNN (FS-G), which provides (1) a unified view for modularizing and expressing FGL algorithms; (2) comprehensive DataZoo and ModelZoo for out-of-the-box FGL capability; (3) an efficient model auto-tuning component; and (4) off-the-shelf privacy attack and defense abilities. We validate the effectiveness of FS-G by conducting extensive experiments, which simultaneously gains many valuable insights about FGL for the community. Moreover, we employ FS-G to serve the FGL application in real-world E-commerce scenarios, where the attained improvements indicate great potential business benefits. We publicly release FS-G, as submodules of FederatedScope, at //github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope to promote FGL's research and enable broad applications that would otherwise be infeasible due to the lack of a dedicated package.
Unsupervised domain adaptation has recently emerged as an effective paradigm for generalizing deep neural networks to new target domains. However, there is still enormous potential to be tapped to reach the fully supervised performance. In this paper, we present a novel active learning strategy to assist knowledge transfer in the target domain, dubbed active domain adaptation. We start from an observation that energy-based models exhibit free energy biases when training (source) and test (target) data come from different distributions. Inspired by this inherent mechanism, we empirically reveal that a simple yet efficient energy-based sampling strategy sheds light on selecting the most valuable target samples than existing approaches requiring particular architectures or computation of the distances. Our algorithm, Energy-based Active Domain Adaptation (EADA), queries groups of targe data that incorporate both domain characteristic and instance uncertainty into every selection round. Meanwhile, by aligning the free energy of target data compact around the source domain via a regularization term, domain gap can be implicitly diminished. Through extensive experiments, we show that EADA surpasses state-of-the-art methods on well-known challenging benchmarks with substantial improvements, making it a useful option in the open world. Code is available at //github.com/BIT-DA/EADA.
There recently has been a surge of interest in developing a new class of deep learning (DL) architectures that integrate an explicit time dimension as a fundamental building block of learning and representation mechanisms. In turn, many recent results show that topological descriptors of the observed data, encoding information on the shape of the dataset in a topological space at different scales, that is, persistent homology of the data, may contain important complementary information, improving both performance and robustness of DL. As convergence of these two emerging ideas, we propose to enhance DL architectures with the most salient time-conditioned topological information of the data and introduce the concept of zigzag persistence into time-aware graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Zigzag persistence provides a systematic and mathematically rigorous framework to track the most important topological features of the observed data that tend to manifest themselves over time. To integrate the extracted time-conditioned topological descriptors into DL, we develop a new topological summary, zigzag persistence image, and derive its theoretical stability guarantees. We validate the new GCNs with a time-aware zigzag topological layer (Z-GCNETs), in application to traffic forecasting and Ethereum blockchain price prediction. Our results indicate that Z-GCNET outperforms 13 state-of-the-art methods on 4 time series datasets.
In semi-supervised domain adaptation, a few labeled samples per class in the target domain guide features of the remaining target samples to aggregate around them. However, the trained model cannot produce a highly discriminative feature representation for the target domain because the training data is dominated by labeled samples from the source domain. This could lead to disconnection between the labeled and unlabeled target samples as well as misalignment between unlabeled target samples and the source domain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Cross-domain Adaptive Clustering to address this problem. To achieve both inter-domain and intra-domain adaptation, we first introduce an adversarial adaptive clustering loss to group features of unlabeled target data into clusters and perform cluster-wise feature alignment across the source and target domains. We further apply pseudo labeling to unlabeled samples in the target domain and retain pseudo-labels with high confidence. Pseudo labeling expands the number of ``labeled" samples in each class in the target domain, and thus produces a more robust and powerful cluster core for each class to facilitate adversarial learning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including DomainNet, Office-Home and Office, demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance in semi-supervised domain adaptation.
Multi-paragraph reasoning is indispensable for open-domain question answering (OpenQA), which receives less attention in the current OpenQA systems. In this work, we propose a knowledge-enhanced graph neural network (KGNN), which performs reasoning over multiple paragraphs with entities. To explicitly capture the entities' relatedness, KGNN utilizes relational facts in knowledge graph to build the entity graph. The experimental results show that KGNN outperforms in both distractor and full wiki settings than baselines methods on HotpotQA dataset. And our further analysis illustrates KGNN is effective and robust with more retrieved paragraphs.
User engagement is a critical metric for evaluating the quality of open-domain dialogue systems. Prior work has focused on conversation-level engagement by using heuristically constructed features such as the number of turns and the total time of the conversation. In this paper, we investigate the possibility and efficacy of estimating utterance-level engagement and define a novel metric, {\em predictive engagement}, for automatic evaluation of open-domain dialogue systems. Our experiments demonstrate that (1) human annotators have high agreement on assessing utterance-level engagement scores; (2) conversation-level engagement scores can be predicted from properly aggregated utterance-level engagement scores. Furthermore, we show that the utterance-level engagement scores can be learned from data. These scores can improve automatic evaluation metrics for open-domain dialogue systems, as shown by correlation with human judgements. This suggests that predictive engagement can be used as a real-time feedback for training better dialogue models.
The cross-domain recommendation technique is an effective way of alleviating the data sparsity in recommender systems by leveraging the knowledge from relevant domains. Transfer learning is a class of algorithms underlying these techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel transfer learning approach for cross-domain recommendation by using neural networks as the base model. We assume that hidden layers in two base networks are connected by cross mappings, leading to the collaborative cross networks (CoNet). CoNet enables dual knowledge transfer across domains by introducing cross connections from one base network to another and vice versa. CoNet is achieved in multi-layer feedforward networks by adding dual connections and joint loss functions, which can be trained efficiently by back-propagation. The proposed model is evaluated on two real-world datasets and it outperforms baseline models by relative improvements of 3.56\% in MRR and 8.94\% in NDCG, respectively.