Multi-agent learning has gained increasing attention to tackle distributed machine learning scenarios under constrictions of data exchanging. However, existing multi-agent learning models usually consider data fusion under fixed and compulsory collaborative relations among agents, which is not as flexible and autonomous as human collaboration. To fill this gap, we propose a distributed multi-agent learning model inspired by human collaboration, in which the agents can autonomously detect suitable collaborators and refer to collaborators' model for better performance. To implement such adaptive collaboration, we use a collaboration graph to indicate the pairwise collaborative relation. The collaboration graph can be obtained by graph learning techniques based on model similarity between different agents. Since model similarity can not be formulated by a fixed graphical optimization, we design a graph learning network by unrolling, which can learn underlying similar features among potential collaborators. By testing on both regression and classification tasks, we validate that our proposed collaboration model can figure out accurate collaborative relationship and greatly improve agents' learning performance.
Multi-agent systems can be extremely efficient when working concurrently and collaboratively, e.g., for transportation, maintenance, search and rescue. Coordination of such teams often involves two aspects: (i) selecting appropriate sub-teams for different tasks; (ii) designing collaborative control strategies to execute these tasks. The former aspect can be combinatorial w.r.t. the team size, while the latter requires optimization over joint state-spaces under geometric and dynamic constraints. Existing work often tackles one aspect by assuming the other is given, while ignoring their close dependency. This work formulates such problems as combinatorial-hybrid optimizations (CHO), where both the discrete modes of collaboration and the continuous control parameters are optimized simultaneously and iteratively. The proposed framework consists of two interleaved layers: the dynamic formation of task coalitions and the hybrid optimization of collaborative behaviors. Overall feasibility and costs of different coalitions performing various tasks are approximated at different granularities to improve the computational efficiency. At last, a Nash-stable strategy for both task assignment and execution is derived with provable guarantee on the feasibility and quality. Two non-trivial applications of collaborative transportation and dynamic capture are studied against several baselines.
Traditional approaches to the design of multi-agent navigation algorithms consider the environment as a fixed constraint, despite the influence of spatial constraints on agents' performance. Yet hand-designing conducive environment layouts is inefficient and potentially expensive. The goal of this paper is to consider the environment as a decision variable in a system-level optimization problem, where both agent performance and environment cost are incorporated. Towards this end, we propose novel problems of unprioritized and prioritized environment optimization, where the former considers agents unbiasedly and the latter accounts for agent priorities. We show, through formal proofs, under which conditions the environment can change while guaranteeing completeness (i.e., all agents reach goals), and analyze the role of agent priorities in the environment optimization. We proceed to impose real-world constraints on the environment optimization and formulate it mathematically as a constrained stochastic optimization problem. Since the relation between agents, environment and performance is challenging to model, we leverage reinforcement learning to develop a model-free solution and a primal-dual mechanism to handle constraints. Distinct information processing architectures are integrated for various implementation scenarios, including online/offline optimization and discrete/continuous environment. Numerical results corroborate the theory and demonstrate the validity and adaptability of our approach.
Knowledge graphs represent factual knowledge about the world as relationships between concepts and are critical for intelligent decision making in enterprise applications. New knowledge is inferred from the existing facts in the knowledge graphs by encoding the concepts and relations into low-dimensional feature vector representations. The most effective representations for this task, called Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGE), are learned through neural network architectures. Due to their impressive predictive performance, they are increasingly used in high-impact domains like healthcare, finance and education. However, are the black-box KGE models adversarially robust for use in domains with high stakes? This thesis argues that state-of-the-art KGE models are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks, that is, their predictive performance can be degraded by systematically crafted perturbations to the training knowledge graph. To support this argument, two novel data poisoning attacks are proposed that craft input deletions or additions at training time to subvert the learned model's performance at inference time. These adversarial attacks target the task of predicting the missing facts in knowledge graphs using KGE models, and the evaluation shows that the simpler attacks are competitive with or outperform the computationally expensive ones. The thesis contributions not only highlight and provide an opportunity to fix the security vulnerabilities of KGE models, but also help to understand the black-box predictive behaviour of KGE models.
Human-centric perception plays a vital role in vision and graphics. But their data annotations are prohibitively expensive. Therefore, it is desirable to have a versatile pre-train model that serves as a foundation for data-efficient downstream tasks transfer. To this end, we propose the Human-Centric Multi-Modal Contrastive Learning framework HCMoCo that leverages the multi-modal nature of human data (e.g. RGB, depth, 2D keypoints) for effective representation learning. The objective comes with two main challenges: dense pre-train for multi-modality data, efficient usage of sparse human priors. To tackle the challenges, we design the novel Dense Intra-sample Contrastive Learning and Sparse Structure-aware Contrastive Learning targets by hierarchically learning a modal-invariant latent space featured with continuous and ordinal feature distribution and structure-aware semantic consistency. HCMoCo provides pre-train for different modalities by combining heterogeneous datasets, which allows efficient usage of existing task-specific human data. Extensive experiments on four downstream tasks of different modalities demonstrate the effectiveness of HCMoCo, especially under data-efficient settings (7.16% and 12% improvement on DensePose Estimation and Human Parsing). Moreover, we demonstrate the versatility of HCMoCo by exploring cross-modality supervision and missing-modality inference, validating its strong ability in cross-modal association and reasoning.
The adaptive processing of structured data is a long-standing research topic in machine learning that investigates how to automatically learn a mapping from a structured input to outputs of various nature. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the adaptive processing of graphs, which led to the development of different neural network-based methodologies. In this thesis, we take a different route and develop a Bayesian Deep Learning framework for graph learning. The dissertation begins with a review of the principles over which most of the methods in the field are built, followed by a study on graph classification reproducibility issues. We then proceed to bridge the basic ideas of deep learning for graphs with the Bayesian world, by building our deep architectures in an incremental fashion. This framework allows us to consider graphs with discrete and continuous edge features, producing unsupervised embeddings rich enough to reach the state of the art on several classification tasks. Our approach is also amenable to a Bayesian nonparametric extension that automatizes the choice of almost all model's hyper-parameters. Two real-world applications demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning for graphs. The first concerns the prediction of information-theoretic quantities for molecular simulations with supervised neural models. After that, we exploit our Bayesian models to solve a malware-classification task while being robust to intra-procedural code obfuscation techniques. We conclude the dissertation with an attempt to blend the best of the neural and Bayesian worlds together. The resulting hybrid model is able to predict multimodal distributions conditioned on input graphs, with the consequent ability to model stochasticity and uncertainty better than most works. Overall, we aim to provide a Bayesian perspective into the articulated research field of deep learning for graphs.
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.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently become increasingly popular due to their ability to learn complex systems of relations or interactions arising in a broad spectrum of problems ranging from biology and particle physics to social networks and recommendation systems. Despite the plethora of different models for deep learning on graphs, few approaches have been proposed thus far for dealing with graphs that present some sort of dynamic nature (e.g. evolving features or connectivity over time). In this paper, we present Temporal Graph Networks (TGNs), a generic, efficient framework for deep learning on dynamic graphs represented as sequences of timed events. Thanks to a novel combination of memory modules and graph-based operators, TGNs are able to significantly outperform previous approaches being at the same time more computationally efficient. We furthermore show that several previous models for learning on dynamic graphs can be cast as specific instances of our framework. We perform a detailed ablation study of different components of our framework and devise the best configuration that achieves state-of-the-art performance on several transductive and inductive prediction tasks for dynamic graphs.
With the explosion of online news, personalized news recommendation becomes increasingly important for online news platforms to help their users find interesting information. Existing news recommendation methods achieve personalization by building accurate news representations from news content and user representations from their direct interactions with news (e.g., click), while ignoring the high-order relatedness between users and news. Here we propose a news recommendation method which can enhance the representation learning of users and news by modeling their relatedness in a graph setting. In our method, users and news are both viewed as nodes in a bipartite graph constructed from historical user click behaviors. For news representations, a transformer architecture is first exploited to build news semantic representations. Then we combine it with the information from neighbor news in the graph via a graph attention network. For user representations, we not only represent users from their historically clicked news, but also attentively incorporate the representations of their neighbor users in the graph. Improved performances on a large-scale real-world dataset validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Meta-learning extracts the common knowledge acquired from learning different tasks and uses it for unseen tasks. It demonstrates a clear advantage on tasks that have insufficient training data, e.g., few-shot learning. In most meta-learning methods, tasks are implicitly related via the shared model or optimizer. In this paper, we show that a meta-learner that explicitly relates tasks on a graph describing the relations of their output dimensions (e.g., classes) can significantly improve the performance of few-shot learning. This type of graph is usually free or cheap to obtain but has rarely been explored in previous works. We study the prototype based few-shot classification, in which a prototype is generated for each class, such that the nearest neighbor search between the prototypes produces an accurate classification. We introduce "Gated Propagation Network (GPN)", which learns to propagate messages between prototypes of different classes on the graph, so that learning the prototype of each class benefits from the data of other related classes. In GPN, an attention mechanism is used for the aggregation of messages from neighboring classes, and a gate is deployed to choose between the aggregated messages and the message from the class itself. GPN is trained on a sequence of tasks from many-shot to few-shot generated by subgraph sampling. During training, it is able to reuse and update previously achieved prototypes from the memory in a life-long learning cycle. In experiments, we change the training-test discrepancy and test task generation settings for thorough evaluations. GPN outperforms recent meta-learning methods on two benchmark datasets in all studied cases.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.