Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are potential competitors to artificial neural networks (ANNs) due to their high energy-efficiency on neuromorphic hardware. However, SNNs are unfolded over simulation time steps during the training process. Thus, SNNs require much more memory than ANNs, which impedes the training of deeper SNN models. In this paper, we propose the reversible spiking neural network to reduce the memory cost of intermediate activations and membrane potentials during training. Firstly, we extend the reversible architecture along temporal dimension and propose the reversible spiking block, which can reconstruct the computational graph and recompute all intermediate variables in forward pass with a reverse process. On this basis, we adopt the state-of-the-art SNN models to the reversible variants, namely reversible spiking ResNet (RevSResNet) and reversible spiking transformer (RevSFormer). Through experiments on static and neuromorphic datasets, we demonstrate that the memory cost per image of our reversible SNNs does not increase with the network depth. On CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 datasets, our RevSResNet37 and RevSFormer-4-384 achieve comparable accuracies and consume 3.79x and 3.00x lower GPU memory per image than their counterparts with roughly identical model complexity and parameters. We believe that this work can unleash the memory constraints in SNN training and pave the way for training extremely large and deep SNNs. The code is available at //github.com/mi804/RevSNN.git.
Recommender systems (RSs) have become an essential tool for mitigating information overload in a range of real-world applications. Recent trends in RSs have revealed a major paradigm shift, moving the spotlight from model-centric innovations to data-centric efforts (e.g., improving data quality and quantity). This evolution has given rise to the concept of data-centric recommender systems (Data-Centric RSs), marking a significant development in the field. This survey provides the first systematic overview of Data-Centric RSs, covering 1) the foundational concepts of recommendation data and Data-Centric RSs; 2) three primary issues of recommendation data; 3) recent research developed to address these issues; and 4) several potential future directions of Data-Centric RSs.
Deep neural networks have exhibited remarkable performance in a variety of computer vision fields, especially in semantic segmentation tasks. Their success is often attributed to multi-level feature fusion, which enables them to understand both global and local information from an image. However, we found that multi-level features from parallel branches are on different scales. The scale disequilibrium is a universal and unwanted flaw that leads to detrimental gradient descent, thereby degrading performance in semantic segmentation. We discover that scale disequilibrium is caused by bilinear upsampling, which is supported by both theoretical and empirical evidence. Based on this observation, we propose injecting scale equalizers to achieve scale equilibrium across multi-level features after bilinear upsampling. Our proposed scale equalizers are easy to implement, applicable to any architecture, hyperparameter-free, implementable without requiring extra computational cost, and guarantee scale equilibrium for any dataset. Experiments showed that adopting scale equalizers consistently improved the mIoU index across various target datasets, including ADE20K, PASCAL VOC 2012, and Cityscapes, as well as various decoder choices, including UPerHead, PSPHead, ASPPHead, SepASPPHead, and FCNHead.
Due to the data imbalance and the diversity of defects, student-teacher networks (S-T) are favored in unsupervised anomaly detection, which explores the discrepancy in feature representation derived from the knowledge distillation process to recognize anomalies. However, vanilla S-T network is not stable. Employing identical structures to construct the S-T network may weaken the representative discrepancy on anomalies. But using different structures can increase the likelihood of divergent performance on normal data. To address this problem, we propose a novel dual-student knowledge distillation (DSKD) architecture. Different from other S-T networks, we use two student networks a single pre-trained teacher network, where the students have the same scale but inverted structures. This framework can enhance the distillation effect to improve the consistency in recognition of normal data, and simultaneously introduce diversity for anomaly representation. To explore high-dimensional semantic information to capture anomaly clues, we employ two strategies. First, a pyramid matching mode is used to perform knowledge distillation on multi-scale feature maps in the intermediate layers of networks. Second, an interaction is facilitated between the two student networks through a deep feature embedding module, which is inspired by real-world group discussions. In terms of classification, we obtain pixel-wise anomaly segmentation maps by measuring the discrepancy between the output feature maps of the teacher and student networks, from which an anomaly score is computed for sample-wise determination. We evaluate DSKD on three benchmark datasets and probe the effects of internal modules through ablation experiments. The results demonstrate that DSKD can achieve exceptional performance on small models like ResNet18 and effectively improve vanilla S-T networks.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a type of deep learning models that learning over graphs, and have been successfully applied in many domains. Despite the effectiveness of GNNs, it is still challenging for GNNs to efficiently scale to large graphs. As a remedy, distributed computing becomes a promising solution of training large-scale GNNs, since it is able to provide abundant computing resources. However, the dependency of graph structure increases the difficulty of achieving high-efficiency distributed GNN training, which suffers from the massive communication and workload imbalance. In recent years, many efforts have been made on distributed GNN training, and an array of training algorithms and systems have been proposed. Yet, there is a lack of systematic review on the optimization techniques from graph processing to distributed execution. In this survey, we analyze three major challenges in distributed GNN training that are massive feature communication, the loss of model accuracy and workload imbalance. Then we introduce a new taxonomy for the optimization techniques in distributed GNN training that address the above challenges. The new taxonomy classifies existing techniques into four categories that are GNN data partition, GNN batch generation, GNN execution model, and GNN communication protocol.We carefully discuss the techniques in each category. In the end, we summarize existing distributed GNN systems for multi-GPUs, GPU-clusters and CPU-clusters, respectively, and give a discussion about the future direction on scalable GNNs.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been proven to be effective in various network-related tasks. Most existing GNNs usually exploit the low-frequency signals of node features, which gives rise to one fundamental question: is the low-frequency information all we need in the real world applications? In this paper, we first present an experimental investigation assessing the roles of low-frequency and high-frequency signals, where the results clearly show that exploring low-frequency signal only is distant from learning an effective node representation in different scenarios. How can we adaptively learn more information beyond low-frequency information in GNNs? A well-informed answer can help GNNs enhance the adaptability. We tackle this challenge and propose a novel Frequency Adaptation Graph Convolutional Networks (FAGCN) with a self-gating mechanism, which can adaptively integrate different signals in the process of message passing. For a deeper understanding, we theoretically analyze the roles of low-frequency signals and high-frequency signals on learning node representations, which further explains why FAGCN can perform well on different types of networks. Extensive experiments on six real-world networks validate that FAGCN not only alleviates the over-smoothing problem, but also has advantages over the state-of-the-arts.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used in representation learning on graphs and achieved state-of-the-art performance in tasks such as node classification and link prediction. However, most existing GNNs are designed to learn node representations on the fixed and homogeneous graphs. The limitations especially become problematic when learning representations on a misspecified graph or a heterogeneous graph that consists of various types of nodes and edges. In this paper, we propose Graph Transformer Networks (GTNs) that are capable of generating new graph structures, which involve identifying useful connections between unconnected nodes on the original graph, while learning effective node representation on the new graphs in an end-to-end fashion. Graph Transformer layer, a core layer of GTNs, learns a soft selection of edge types and composite relations for generating useful multi-hop connections so-called meta-paths. Our experiments show that GTNs learn new graph structures, based on data and tasks without domain knowledge, and yield powerful node representation via convolution on the new graphs. Without domain-specific graph preprocessing, GTNs achieved the best performance in all three benchmark node classification tasks against the state-of-the-art methods that require pre-defined meta-paths from domain knowledge.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for embedding-based entity alignment due to their capability of identifying isomorphic subgraphs. However, in real knowledge graphs (KGs), the counterpart entities usually have non-isomorphic neighborhood structures, which easily causes GNNs to yield different representations for them. To tackle this problem, we propose a new KG alignment network, namely AliNet, aiming at mitigating the non-isomorphism of neighborhood structures in an end-to-end manner. As the direct neighbors of counterpart entities are usually dissimilar due to the schema heterogeneity, AliNet introduces distant neighbors to expand the overlap between their neighborhood structures. It employs an attention mechanism to highlight helpful distant neighbors and reduce noises. Then, it controls the aggregation of both direct and distant neighborhood information using a gating mechanism. We further propose a relation loss to refine entity representations. We perform thorough experiments with detailed ablation studies and analyses on five entity alignment datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of AliNet.
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.
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.