Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have achieved great success in graph representation learning by extracting high-level features from nodes and their topology. Since GCNs generally follow a message-passing mechanism, each node aggregates information from its first-order neighbour to update its representation. As a result, the representations of nodes with edges between them should be positively correlated and thus can be considered positive samples. However, there are more non-neighbour nodes in the whole graph, which provide diverse and useful information for the representation update. Two non-adjacent nodes usually have different representations, which can be seen as negative samples. Besides the node representations, the structural information of the graph is also crucial for learning. In this paper, we used quality-diversity decomposition in determinant point processes (DPP) to obtain diverse negative samples. When defining a distribution on diverse subsets of all non-neighbouring nodes, we incorporate both graph structure information and node representations. Since the DPP sampling process requires matrix eigenvalue decomposition, we propose a new shortest-path-base method to improve computational efficiency. Finally, we incorporate the obtained negative samples into the graph convolution operation. The ideas are evaluated empirically in experiments on node classification tasks. These experiments show that the newly proposed methods not only improve the overall performance of standard representation learning but also significantly alleviate over-smoothing problems.
Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing capacity at planning and executing a high-level goal in a live computer environment (e.g. MiniWoB++). To perform a task, recent works often require a model to learn from trace examples of the task via either supervised learning or few/many-shot prompting. Without these trace examples, it remains a challenge how an agent can autonomously learn and improve its control on a computer, which limits the ability of an agent to perform a new task. We approach this problem with a zero-shot agent that requires no given expert traces. Our agent plans for executable actions on a partially observed environment, and iteratively progresses a task by identifying and learning from its mistakes via self-reflection and structured thought management. On the easy tasks of MiniWoB++, we show that our zero-shot agent often outperforms recent SoTAs, with more efficient reasoning. For tasks with more complexity, our reflective agent performs on par with prior best models, even though previous works had the advantages of accessing expert traces or additional screen information.
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) were a great step towards extending deep learning to unstructured data such as graphs. But GCNs still need a constructed graph to work with. To solve this problem, classical graphs such as $k$-nearest neighbor are usually used to initialize the GCN. Although it is computationally efficient to construct $k$-nn graphs, the constructed graph might not be very useful for learning. In a $k$-nn graph, points are restricted to have a fixed number of edges, and all edges in the graph have equal weights. We present a new way to construct the graph and initialize the GCN. It is based on random projection forest (rpForest). rpForest enables us to assign varying weights on edges indicating varying importance, which enhanced the learning. The number of trees is a hyperparameter in rpForest. We performed spectral analysis to help us setting this parameter in the right range. In the experiments, initializing the GCN using rpForest provides better results compared to $k$-nn initialization.
When vehicle routing decisions are intertwined with higher-level decisions, the resulting optimization problems pose significant challenges for computation. Examples are the multi-depot vehicle routing problem (MDVRP), where customers are assigned to depots before delivery, and the capacitated location routing problem (CLRP), where the locations of depots should be determined first. A simple and straightforward approach for such hierarchical problems would be to separate the higher-level decisions from the complicated vehicle routing decisions. For each higher-level decision candidate, we may evaluate the underlying vehicle routing problems to assess the candidate. As this approach requires solving vehicle routing problems multiple times, it has been regarded as impractical in most cases. We propose a novel deep-learning-based approach called Genetic Algorithm with Neural Cost Predictor (GANCP) to tackle the challenge and simplify algorithm developments. For each higher-level decision candidate, we predict the objective function values of the underlying vehicle routing problems using a pre-trained graph neural network without actually solving the routing problems. In particular, our proposed neural network learns the objective values of the HGS-CVRP open-source package that solves capacitated vehicle routing problems. Our numerical experiments show that this simplified approach is effective and efficient in generating high-quality solutions for both MDVRP and CLRP and has the potential to expedite algorithm developments for complicated hierarchical problems. We provide computational results evaluated in the standard benchmark instances used in the literature.
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.
Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used for document classification. However, most existing methods are based on static word co-occurrence graphs without sentence-level information, which poses three challenges:(1) word ambiguity, (2) word synonymity, and (3) dynamic contextual dependency. To address these challenges, we propose a novel GNN-based sparse structure learning model for inductive document classification. Specifically, a document-level graph is initially generated by a disjoint union of sentence-level word co-occurrence graphs. Our model collects a set of trainable edges connecting disjoint words between sentences and employs structure learning to sparsely select edges with dynamic contextual dependencies. Graphs with sparse structures can jointly exploit local and global contextual information in documents through GNNs. For inductive learning, the refined document graph is further fed into a general readout function for graph-level classification and optimization in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms most state-of-the-art results, and reveal the necessity to learn sparse structures for each document.
Translational distance-based knowledge graph embedding has shown progressive improvements on the link prediction task, from TransE to the latest state-of-the-art RotatE. However, N-1, 1-N and N-N predictions still remain challenging. In this work, we propose a novel translational distance-based approach for knowledge graph link prediction. The proposed method includes two-folds, first we extend the RotatE from 2D complex domain to high dimension space with orthogonal transforms to model relations for better modeling capacity. Second, the graph context is explicitly modeled via two directed context representations. These context representations are used as part of the distance scoring function to measure the plausibility of the triples during training and inference. The proposed approach effectively improves prediction accuracy on the difficult N-1, 1-N and N-N cases for knowledge graph link prediction task. The experimental results show that it achieves better performance on two benchmark data sets compared to the baseline RotatE, especially on data set (FB15k-237) with many high in-degree connection nodes.
There has been appreciable progress in unsupervised network representation learning (UNRL) approaches over graphs recently with flexible random-walk approaches, new optimization objectives and deep architectures. However, there is no common ground for systematic comparison of embeddings to understand their behavior for different graphs and tasks. In this paper we theoretically group different approaches under a unifying framework and empirically investigate the effectiveness of different network representation methods. In particular, we argue that most of the UNRL approaches either explicitly or implicit model and exploit context information of a node. Consequently, we propose a framework that casts a variety of approaches -- random walk based, matrix factorization and deep learning based -- into a unified context-based optimization function. We systematically group the methods based on their similarities and differences. We study the differences among these methods in detail which we later use to explain their performance differences (on downstream tasks). We conduct a large-scale empirical study considering 9 popular and recent UNRL techniques and 11 real-world datasets with varying structural properties and two common tasks -- node classification and link prediction. We find that there is no single method that is a clear winner and that the choice of a suitable method is dictated by certain properties of the embedding methods, task and structural properties of the underlying graph. In addition we also report the common pitfalls in evaluation of UNRL methods and come up with suggestions for experimental design and interpretation of results.
Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have revolutionized the field of graph representation learning through effectively learned node embeddings, and achieved state-of-the-art results in tasks such as node classification and link prediction. However, current GNN methods are inherently flat and do not learn hierarchical representations of graphs---a limitation that is especially problematic for the task of graph classification, where the goal is to predict the label associated with an entire graph. Here we propose DiffPool, a differentiable graph pooling module that can generate hierarchical representations of graphs and can be combined with various graph neural network architectures in an end-to-end fashion. DiffPool learns a differentiable soft cluster assignment for nodes at each layer of a deep GNN, mapping nodes to a set of clusters, which then form the coarsened input for the next GNN layer. Our experimental results show that combining existing GNN methods with DiffPool yields an average improvement of 5-10% accuracy on graph classification benchmarks, compared to all existing pooling approaches, achieving a new state-of-the-art on four out of five benchmark data sets.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been found to be vulnerable to adversarial examples resulting from adding small-magnitude perturbations to inputs. Such adversarial examples can mislead DNNs to produce adversary-selected results. Different attack strategies have been proposed to generate adversarial examples, but how to produce them with high perceptual quality and more efficiently requires more research efforts. In this paper, we propose AdvGAN to generate adversarial examples with generative adversarial networks (GANs), which can learn and approximate the distribution of original instances. For AdvGAN, once the generator is trained, it can generate adversarial perturbations efficiently for any instance, so as to potentially accelerate adversarial training as defenses. We apply AdvGAN in both semi-whitebox and black-box attack settings. In semi-whitebox attacks, there is no need to access the original target model after the generator is trained, in contrast to traditional white-box attacks. In black-box attacks, we dynamically train a distilled model for the black-box model and optimize the generator accordingly. Adversarial examples generated by AdvGAN on different target models have high attack success rate under state-of-the-art defenses compared to other attacks. Our attack has placed the first with 92.76% accuracy on a public MNIST black-box attack challenge.
Recently, deep learning has achieved very promising results in visual object tracking. Deep neural networks in existing tracking methods require a lot of training data to learn a large number of parameters. However, training data is not sufficient for visual object tracking as annotations of a target object are only available in the first frame of a test sequence. In this paper, we propose to learn hierarchical features for visual object tracking by using tree structure based Recursive Neural Networks (RNN), which have fewer parameters than other deep neural networks, e.g. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). First, we learn RNN parameters to discriminate between the target object and background in the first frame of a test sequence. Tree structure over local patches of an exemplar region is randomly generated by using a bottom-up greedy search strategy. Given the learned RNN parameters, we create two dictionaries regarding target regions and corresponding local patches based on the learned hierarchical features from both top and leaf nodes of multiple random trees. In each of the subsequent frames, we conduct sparse dictionary coding on all candidates to select the best candidate as the new target location. In addition, we online update two dictionaries to handle appearance changes of target objects. Experimental results demonstrate that our feature learning algorithm can significantly improve tracking performance on benchmark datasets.