We consider the problem of fair column subset selection. In particular, we assume that two groups are present in the data, and the chosen column subset must provide a good approximation for both, relative to their respective best rank-k approximations. We show that this fair setting introduces significant challenges: in order to extend known results, one cannot do better than the trivial solution of simply picking twice as many columns as the original methods. We adopt a known approach based on deterministic leverage-score sampling, and show that merely sampling a subset of appropriate size becomes NP-hard in the presence of two groups. Whereas finding a subset of two times the desired size is trivial, we provide an efficient algorithm that achieves the same guarantees with essentially 1.5 times that size. We validate our methods through an extensive set of experiments on real-world data.
Reasoning about the sensitivity of functions with respect to their inputs has interesting applications in various areas, such as differential privacy. In order to check and enforce sensitivity, several approaches have been developed, notably sensitivity type systems. In these systems, sensitivity can be seen as an effect in the sense of type-and-effects systems as originally proposed by Gifford and Lucassen. Because type-and-effect systems can make certain useful programming patterns tedious or overly conservative, there is value in bringing the benefits of gradual typing to these disciplines in order to ease their adoption. In this work, we motivate, formalize, and prototype gradual sensitivity typing. The language GSoul supports both the unrestricted unknown sensitivity and bounded imprecision in the form of intervals. Gradual sensitivity typing allows programmers to smoothly evolve typed programs without any static sensitivity information towards hardened programs with a mix of static and dynamic sensitivity checking. In particular, we show that gradual sensitivity supports recursive functions for which fully static checking would be overly conservative, seamlessly enabling exact runtime sensitivity checks. GSoul satisfies both the gradual guarantees and sensitivity type soundness, known as metric preservation. We establish that, in general, gradual metric preservation is termination insensitive, and that one can achieve termination-sensitive gradual metric preservation by hardening specifications to bounded imprecision. We implement a prototype that provides an interactive test bed for gradual sensitivity typing. This work opens the door to gradualizing other typing disciplines that rely on function sensitivity such as differential privacy, as well as other quantitative type-based reasoning techniques.
An important problem in computational topology is to calculate the homology of a space from samples. In this work, we develop a statistical approach to this problem by calculating the expected rank of an induced map on homology from a sub-sample to the full space. We develop a greedy matroid algorithm for finding an optimal basis for the image of the induced map, and investigate the relationship between this algorithm and the probability of sampling vectors in the image of the induced map.
In recent years, we have witnessed a surge of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), most of which can learn powerful representations in an end-to-end fashion with great success in many real-world applications. They have resemblance to Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGMs), but break free from some limitations of PGMs. By aiming to provide expressive methods for representation learning instead of computing marginals or most likely configurations, GNNs provide flexibility in the choice of information flowing rules while maintaining good performance. Despite their success and inspirations, they lack efficient ways to represent and learn higher-order relations among variables/nodes. More expressive higher-order GNNs which operate on k-tuples of nodes need increased computational resources in order to process higher-order tensors. We propose Factor Graph Neural Networks (FGNNs) to effectively capture higher-order relations for inference and learning. To do so, we first derive an efficient approximate Sum-Product loopy belief propagation inference algorithm for discrete higher-order PGMs. We then neuralize the novel message passing scheme into a Factor Graph Neural Network (FGNN) module by allowing richer representations of the message update rules; this facilitates both efficient inference and powerful end-to-end learning. We further show that with a suitable choice of message aggregation operators, our FGNN is also able to represent Max-Product belief propagation, providing a single family of architecture that can represent both Max and Sum-Product loopy belief propagation. Our extensive experimental evaluation on synthetic as well as real datasets demonstrates the potential of the proposed model.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been successfully used in many problems involving graph-structured data, achieving state-of-the-art performance. GNNs typically employ a message-passing scheme, in which every node aggregates information from its neighbors using a permutation-invariant aggregation function. Standard well-examined choices such as the mean or sum aggregation functions have limited capabilities, as they are not able to capture interactions among neighbors. In this work, we formalize these interactions using an information-theoretic framework that notably includes synergistic information. Driven by this definition, we introduce the Graph Ordering Attention (GOAT) layer, a novel GNN component that captures interactions between nodes in a neighborhood. This is achieved by learning local node orderings via an attention mechanism and processing the ordered representations using a recurrent neural network aggregator. This design allows us to make use of a permutation-sensitive aggregator while maintaining the permutation-equivariance of the proposed GOAT layer. The GOAT model demonstrates its increased performance in modeling graph metrics that capture complex information, such as the betweenness centrality and the effective size of a node. In practical use-cases, its superior modeling capability is confirmed through its success in several real-world node classification benchmarks.
Technology ecosystems often undergo significant transformations as they mature. For example, telephony, the Internet, and PCs all started with a single provider, but in the United States each is now served by a competitive market that uses comprehensive and universal technology standards to provide compatibility. This white paper presents our view on how the cloud ecosystem, barely over fifteen years old, could evolve as it matures.
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.
Humans have a natural instinct to identify unknown object instances in their environments. The intrinsic curiosity about these unknown instances aids in learning about them, when the corresponding knowledge is eventually available. This motivates us to propose a novel computer vision problem called: `Open World Object Detection', where a model is tasked to: 1) identify objects that have not been introduced to it as `unknown', without explicit supervision to do so, and 2) incrementally learn these identified unknown categories without forgetting previously learned classes, when the corresponding labels are progressively received. We formulate the problem, introduce a strong evaluation protocol and provide a novel solution, which we call ORE: Open World Object Detector, based on contrastive clustering and energy based unknown identification. Our experimental evaluation and ablation studies analyze the efficacy of ORE in achieving Open World objectives. As an interesting by-product, we find that identifying and characterizing unknown instances helps to reduce confusion in an incremental object detection setting, where we achieve state-of-the-art performance, with no extra methodological effort. We hope that our work will attract further research into this newly identified, yet crucial research direction.
As a field of AI, Machine Reasoning (MR) uses largely symbolic means to formalize and emulate abstract reasoning. Studies in early MR have notably started inquiries into Explainable AI (XAI) -- arguably one of the biggest concerns today for the AI community. Work on explainable MR as well as on MR approaches to explainability in other areas of AI has continued ever since. It is especially potent in modern MR branches, such as argumentation, constraint and logic programming, planning. We hereby aim to provide a selective overview of MR explainability techniques and studies in hopes that insights from this long track of research will complement well the current XAI landscape. This document reports our work in-progress on MR explainability.
Graphs, which describe pairwise relations between objects, are essential representations of many real-world data such as social networks. In recent years, graph neural networks, which extend the neural network models to graph data, have attracted increasing attention. Graph neural networks have been applied to advance many different graph related tasks such as reasoning dynamics of the physical system, graph classification, and node classification. Most of the existing graph neural network models have been designed for static graphs, while many real-world graphs are inherently dynamic. For example, social networks are naturally evolving as new users joining and new relations being created. Current graph neural network models cannot utilize the dynamic information in dynamic graphs. However, the dynamic information has been proven to enhance the performance of many graph analytical tasks such as community detection and link prediction. Hence, it is necessary to design dedicated graph neural networks for dynamic graphs. In this paper, we propose DGNN, a new {\bf D}ynamic {\bf G}raph {\bf N}eural {\bf N}etwork model, which can model the dynamic information as the graph evolving. In particular, the proposed framework can keep updating node information by capturing the sequential information of edges, the time intervals between edges and information propagation coherently. Experimental results on various dynamic graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
We investigate a lattice-structured LSTM model for Chinese NER, which encodes a sequence of input characters as well as all potential words that match a lexicon. Compared with character-based methods, our model explicitly leverages word and word sequence information. Compared with word-based methods, lattice LSTM does not suffer from segmentation errors. Gated recurrent cells allow our model to choose the most relevant characters and words from a sentence for better NER results. Experiments on various datasets show that lattice LSTM outperforms both word-based and character-based LSTM baselines, achieving the best results.