Regular path queries (RPQs) are an essential component of graph query languages. Such queries consider a regular expression r and a directed edge-labeled graph G and search for paths in G for which the sequence of labels is in the language of r. In order to avoid having to consider infinitely many paths, some database engines restrict such paths to be trails, that is, they only consider paths without repeated edges. In this paper we consider the evaluation problem for RPQs under trail semantics, in the case where the expression is fixed. We show that, in this setting, there exists a trichotomy. More precisely, the complexity of RPQ evaluation divides the regular languages into the finite languages, the class Ttract (for which the problem is tractable), and the rest. Interestingly, the tractable class in the trichotomy is larger than for the trichotomy for simple paths, discovered by Bagan, Bonifati, and Groz [JCSS 2020]. In addition to this trichotomy result, we also study characterizations of the tractable class, its expressivity, the recognition problem, closure properties, and show how the decision problem can be extended to the enumeration problem, which is relevant to practice.
We introduce discriminator guidance in the setting of Autoregressive Diffusion Models. The use of a discriminator to guide a diffusion process has previously been used for continuous diffusion models, and in this work we derive ways of using a discriminator together with a pretrained generative model in the discrete case. First, we show that using an optimal discriminator will correct the pretrained model and enable exact sampling from the underlying data distribution. Second, to account for the realistic scenario of using a sub-optimal discriminator, we derive a sequential Monte Carlo algorithm which iteratively takes the predictions from the discrimiator into account during the generation process. We test these approaches on the task of generating molecular graphs and show how the discriminator improves the generative performance over using only the pretrained model.
Neural Module Networks (NMN) are a compelling method for visual question answering, enabling the translation of a question into a program consisting of a series of reasoning sub-tasks that are sequentially executed on the image to produce an answer. NMNs provide enhanced explainability compared to integrated models, allowing for a better understanding of the underlying reasoning process. To improve the effectiveness of NMNs we propose to exploit features obtained by a large-scale cross-modal encoder. Also, the current training approach of NMNs relies on the propagation of module outputs to subsequent modules, leading to the accumulation of prediction errors and the generation of false answers. To mitigate this, we introduce an NMN learning strategy involving scheduled teacher guidance. Initially, the model is fully guided by the ground-truth intermediate outputs, but gradually transitions to an autonomous behavior as training progresses. This reduces error accumulation, thus improving training efficiency and final performance.We demonstrate that by incorporating cross-modal features and employing more effective training techniques for NMN, we achieve a favorable balance between performance and transparency in the reasoning process.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) always suffered from the problem of long acquisition time. MRI reconstruction is one solution to reduce scan time by skipping certain phase-encoding lines and then restoring high-quality images from undersampled measurements. Recently, implicit neural representation (INR) has emerged as a new deep learning method that represents an object as a continuous function of spatial coordinates, and this function is normally parameterized by a multilayer perceptron (MLP). In this paper, we propose a novel MRI parallel reconstruction method based on INR, which represents the fully-sampled images as the function of voxel coordinates and prior feature vectors of undersampled images for overcoming the generalization problem of INR. Specifically, we introduce a scale-embedded encoder to produce scale-independent voxel-specific features from MR images with different undersampled scales and then concatenate with coordinates vectors to recover fully-sampled MR images via an MLP, thus achieving arbitrary scale reconstruction. The performance of the proposed method was assessed by experimenting on publicly available MRI datasets and compared with other reconstruction methods. Our quantitative evaluation demonstrates the superiority of the proposed method over alternative reconstruction methods.
Despite the success of Siamese encoder models such as sentence transformers (ST), little is known about the aspects of inputs they pay attention to. A barrier is that their predictions cannot be attributed to individual features, as they compare two inputs rather than processing a single one. This paper derives a local attribution method for Siamese encoders by generalizing the principle of integrated gradients to models with multiple inputs. The solution takes the form of feature-pair attributions, and can be reduced to a token-token matrix for STs. Our method involves the introduction of integrated Jacobians and inherits the advantageous formal properties of integrated gradients: it accounts for the model's full computation graph and is guaranteed to converge to the actual prediction. A pilot study shows that in an ST few token-pairs can often explain large fractions of predictions, and it focuses on nouns and verbs. For accurate predictions, it however needs to attend to the majority of tokens and parts of speech.
Significant computational resources are required to train Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) at a large scale, and the process is highly data-intensive. One of the most effective ways to reduce resource requirements is minibatch training coupled with graph sampling. GNNs have the unique property that items in a minibatch have overlapping data. However, the commonly implemented Independent Minibatching approach assigns each Processing Element (PE) its own minibatch to process, leading to duplicated computations and input data access across PEs. This amplifies the Neighborhood Explosion Phenomenon (NEP), which is the main bottleneck limiting scaling. To reduce the effects of NEP in the multi-PE setting, we propose a new approach called Cooperative Minibatching. Our approach capitalizes on the fact that the size of the sampled subgraph is a concave function of the batch size, leading to significant reductions in the amount of work per seed vertex as batch sizes increase. Hence, it is favorable for processors equipped with a fast interconnect to work on a large minibatch together as a single larger processor, instead of working on separate smaller minibatches, even though global batch size is identical. We also show how to take advantage of the same phenomenon in serial execution by generating dependent consecutive minibatches. Our experimental evaluations show up to 4x bandwidth savings for fetching vertex embeddings, by simply increasing this dependency without harming model convergence. Combining our proposed approaches, we achieve up to 64% speedup over Independent Minibatching on single-node multi-GPU systems.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown promising performance for knowledge graph reasoning. A recent variant of GNN called progressive relational graph neural network (PRGNN), utilizes relational rules to infer missing knowledge in relational digraphs and achieves notable results. However, during reasoning with PRGNN, two important properties are often overlooked: (1) the sequentiality of relation composition, where the order of combining different relations affects the semantics of the relational rules, and (2) the lagged entity information propagation, where the transmission speed of required information lags behind the appearance speed of new entities. Ignoring these properties leads to incorrect relational rule learning and decreased reasoning accuracy. To address these issues, we propose a novel knowledge graph reasoning approach, the Relational rUle eNhanced Graph Neural Network (RUN-GNN). Specifically, RUN-GNN employs a query related fusion gate unit to model the sequentiality of relation composition and utilizes a buffering update mechanism to alleviate the negative effect of lagged entity information propagation, resulting in higher-quality relational rule learning. Experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate the superiority of RUN-GNN is superior on both transductive and inductive link prediction tasks.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) is widely used to learn a powerful representation of graph-structured data. Recent work demonstrates that transferring knowledge from self-supervised tasks to downstream tasks could further improve graph representation. However, there is an inherent gap between self-supervised tasks and downstream tasks in terms of optimization objective and training data. Conventional pre-training methods may be not effective enough on knowledge transfer since they do not make any adaptation for downstream tasks. To solve such problems, we propose a new transfer learning paradigm on GNNs which could effectively leverage self-supervised tasks as auxiliary tasks to help the target task. Our methods would adaptively select and combine different auxiliary tasks with the target task in the fine-tuning stage. We design an adaptive auxiliary loss weighting model to learn the weights of auxiliary tasks by quantifying the consistency between auxiliary tasks and the target task. In addition, we learn the weighting model through meta-learning. Our methods can be applied to various transfer learning approaches, it performs well not only in multi-task learning but also in pre-training and fine-tuning. Comprehensive experiments on multiple downstream tasks demonstrate that the proposed methods can effectively combine auxiliary tasks with the target task and significantly improve the performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
External knowledge is often useful for natural language understanding tasks. We introduce a contextual text representation model called Conceptual-Contextual (CC) embeddings, which incorporates structured knowledge into text representations. Unlike entity embedding methods, our approach encodes a knowledge graph into a context model. CC embeddings can be easily reused for a wide range of tasks just like pre-trained language models. Our model effectively encodes the huge UMLS database by leveraging semantic generalizability. Experiments on electronic health records (EHRs) and medical text processing benchmarks showed our model gives a major boost to the performance of supervised medical NLP tasks.
External knowledge is often useful for natural language understanding tasks. We introduce a contextual text representation model called Conceptual-Contextual (CC) embeddings, which incorporates structured knowledge into text representations. Unlike entity embedding methods, our approach encodes a knowledge graph into a context model. CC embeddings can be easily reused for a wide range of tasks just like pre-trained language models. Our model effectively encodes the huge UMLS database by leveraging semantic generalizability. Experiments on electronic health records (EHRs) and medical text processing benchmarks showed our model gives a major boost to the performance of supervised medical NLP tasks.