As the rapidly evolving field of machine learning continues to produce incredibly useful tools and models, the potential for quantum computing to provide speed up for machine learning algorithms is becoming increasingly desirable. In particular, quantum circuits in place of classical convolutional filters for image detection-based tasks are being investigated for the ability to exploit quantum advantage. However, these attempts, referred to as quantum convolutional neural networks (QCNNs), lack the ability to efficiently process data with multiple channels and therefore are limited to relatively simple inputs. In this work, we present a variety of hardware-adaptable quantum circuit ansatzes for use as convolutional kernels, and demonstrate that the quantum neural networks we report outperform existing QCNNs on classification tasks involving multi-channel data. We envision that the ability of these implementations to effectively learn inter-channel information will allow quantum machine learning methods to operate with more complex data. This work is available as open source at //github.com/anthonysmaldone/QCNN-Multi-Channel-Supervised-Learning.
The introduction of the European Union's (EU) set of comprehensive regulations relating to technology, the General Data Protection Regulation, grants EU citizens the right to explanations for automated decisions that have significant effects on their life. This poses a substantial challenge, as many of today's state-of-the-art algorithms are generally unexplainable black boxes. Simultaneously, we have seen an emergence of the fields of quantum computation and quantum AI. Due to the fickle nature of quantum information, the problem of explainability is amplified, as measuring a quantum system destroys the information. As a result, there is a need for post-hoc explanations for quantum AI algorithms. In the classical context, the cooperative game theory concept of the Shapley value has been adapted for post-hoc explanations. However, this approach does not translate to use in quantum computing trivially and can be exponentially difficult to implement if not handled with care. We propose a novel algorithm which reduces the problem of accurately estimating the Shapley values of a quantum algorithm into a far simpler problem of estimating the true average of a binomial distribution in polynomial time.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have been widely applied in various fields due to their significant power on processing graph-structured data. Typical GCN and its variants work under a homophily assumption (i.e., nodes with same class are prone to connect to each other), while ignoring the heterophily which exists in many real-world networks (i.e., nodes with different classes tend to form edges). Existing methods deal with heterophily by mainly aggregating higher-order neighborhoods or combing the immediate representations, which leads to noise and irrelevant information in the result. But these methods did not change the propagation mechanism which works under homophily assumption (that is a fundamental part of GCNs). This makes it difficult to distinguish the representation of nodes from different classes. To address this problem, in this paper we design a novel propagation mechanism, which can automatically change the propagation and aggregation process according to homophily or heterophily between node pairs. To adaptively learn the propagation process, we introduce two measurements of homophily degree between node pairs, which is learned based on topological and attribute information, respectively. Then we incorporate the learnable homophily degree into the graph convolution framework, which is trained in an end-to-end schema, enabling it to go beyond the assumption of homophily. More importantly, we theoretically prove that our model can constrain the similarity of representations between nodes according to their homophily degree. Experiments on seven real-world datasets demonstrate that this new approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under heterophily or low homophily, and gains competitive performance under homophily.
Spectral clustering (SC) is a popular clustering technique to find strongly connected communities on a graph. SC can be used in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to implement pooling operations that aggregate nodes belonging to the same cluster. However, the eigendecomposition of the Laplacian is expensive and, since clustering results are graph-specific, pooling methods based on SC must perform a new optimization for each new sample. In this paper, we propose a graph clustering approach that addresses these limitations of SC. We formulate a continuous relaxation of the normalized minCUT problem and train a GNN to compute cluster assignments that minimize this objective. Our GNN-based implementation is differentiable, does not require to compute the spectral decomposition, and learns a clustering function that can be quickly evaluated on out-of-sample graphs. From the proposed clustering method, we design a graph pooling operator that overcomes some important limitations of state-of-the-art graph pooling techniques and achieves the best performance in several supervised and unsupervised tasks.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have recently become the primary choice for learning from graph-structured data, superseding hash fingerprints in representing chemical compounds. However, GCNs lack the ability to take into account the ordering of node neighbors, even when there is a geometric interpretation of the graph vertices that provides an order based on their spatial positions. To remedy this issue, we propose Geometric Graph Convolutional Network (geo-GCN) which uses spatial features to efficiently learn from graphs that can be naturally located in space. Our contribution is threefold: we propose a GCN-inspired architecture which (i) leverages node positions, (ii) is a proper generalisation of both GCNs and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), (iii) benefits from augmentation which further improves the performance and assures invariance with respect to the desired properties. Empirically, geo-GCN outperforms state-of-the-art graph-based methods on image classification and chemical tasks.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) and their variants have experienced significant attention and have become the de facto methods for learning graph representations. GCNs derive inspiration primarily from recent deep learning approaches, and as a result, may inherit unnecessary complexity and redundant computation. In this paper, we reduce this excess complexity through successively removing nonlinearities and collapsing weight matrices between consecutive layers. We theoretically analyze the resulting linear model and show that it corresponds to a fixed low-pass filter followed by a linear classifier. Notably, our experimental evaluation demonstrates that these simplifications do not negatively impact accuracy in many downstream applications. Moreover, the resulting model scales to larger datasets, is naturally interpretable, and yields up to two orders of magnitude speedup over FastGCN.
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are a special type of Neural Networks, which have shown state-of-the-art results on various competitive benchmarks. The powerful learning ability of deep CNN is largely achieved with the use of multiple non-linear feature extraction stages that can automatically learn hierarchical representation from the data. Availability of a large amount of data and improvements in the hardware processing units have accelerated the research in CNNs and recently very interesting deep CNN architectures are reported. The recent race in deep CNN architectures for achieving high performance on the challenging benchmarks has shown that the innovative architectural ideas, as well as parameter optimization, can improve the CNN performance on various vision-related tasks. In this regard, different ideas in the CNN design have been explored such as use of different activation and loss functions, parameter optimization, regularization, and restructuring of processing units. However, the major improvement in representational capacity is achieved by the restructuring of the processing units. Especially, the idea of using a block as a structural unit instead of a layer is gaining substantial appreciation. This survey thus focuses on the intrinsic taxonomy present in the recently reported CNN architectures and consequently, classifies the recent innovations in CNN architectures into seven different categories. These seven categories are based on spatial exploitation, depth, multi-path, width, feature map exploitation, channel boosting and attention. Additionally, it covers the elementary understanding of the CNN components and sheds light on the current challenges and applications of CNNs.
Graph-based semi-supervised learning (SSL) is an important learning problem where the goal is to assign labels to initially unlabeled nodes in a graph. Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have recently been shown to be effective for graph-based SSL problems. GCNs inherently assume existence of pairwise relationships in the graph-structured data. However, in many real-world problems, relationships go beyond pairwise connections and hence are more complex. Hypergraphs provide a natural modeling tool to capture such complex relationships. In this work, we explore the use of GCNs for hypergraph-based SSL. In particular, we propose HyperGCN, an SSL method which uses a layer-wise propagation rule for convolutional neural networks operating directly on hypergraphs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first principled adaptation of GCNs to hypergraphs. HyperGCN is able to encode both the hypergraph structure and hypernode features in an effective manner. Through detailed experimentation, we demonstrate HyperGCN's effectiveness at hypergraph-based SSL.
Nowadays, the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have achieved impressive performance on many computer vision related tasks, such as object detection, image recognition, image retrieval, etc. These achievements benefit from the CNNs outstanding capability to learn the input features with deep layers of neuron structures and iterative training process. However, these learned features are hard to identify and interpret from a human vision perspective, causing a lack of understanding of the CNNs internal working mechanism. To improve the CNN interpretability, the CNN visualization is well utilized as a qualitative analysis method, which translates the internal features into visually perceptible patterns. And many CNN visualization works have been proposed in the literature to interpret the CNN in perspectives of network structure, operation, and semantic concept. In this paper, we expect to provide a comprehensive survey of several representative CNN visualization methods, including Activation Maximization, Network Inversion, Deconvolutional Neural Networks (DeconvNet), and Network Dissection based visualization. These methods are presented in terms of motivations, algorithms, and experiment results. Based on these visualization methods, we also discuss their practical applications to demonstrate the significance of the CNN interpretability in areas of network design, optimization, security enhancement, etc.
Recent advances in 3D fully convolutional networks (FCN) have made it feasible to produce dense voxel-wise predictions of volumetric images. In this work, we show that a multi-class 3D FCN trained on manually labeled CT scans of several anatomical structures (ranging from the large organs to thin vessels) can achieve competitive segmentation results, while avoiding the need for handcrafting features or training class-specific models. To this end, we propose a two-stage, coarse-to-fine approach that will first use a 3D FCN to roughly define a candidate region, which will then be used as input to a second 3D FCN. This reduces the number of voxels the second FCN has to classify to ~10% and allows it to focus on more detailed segmentation of the organs and vessels. We utilize training and validation sets consisting of 331 clinical CT images and test our models on a completely unseen data collection acquired at a different hospital that includes 150 CT scans, targeting three anatomical organs (liver, spleen, and pancreas). In challenging organs such as the pancreas, our cascaded approach improves the mean Dice score from 68.5 to 82.2%, achieving the highest reported average score on this dataset. We compare with a 2D FCN method on a separate dataset of 240 CT scans with 18 classes and achieve a significantly higher performance in small organs and vessels. Furthermore, we explore fine-tuning our models to different datasets. Our experiments illustrate the promise and robustness of current 3D FCN based semantic segmentation of medical images, achieving state-of-the-art results. Our code and trained models are available for download: //github.com/holgerroth/3Dunet_abdomen_cascade.
This paper proposes a method to modify traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) into interpretable CNNs, in order to clarify knowledge representations in high conv-layers of CNNs. In an interpretable CNN, each filter in a high conv-layer represents a certain object part. We do not need any annotations of object parts or textures to supervise the learning process. Instead, the interpretable CNN automatically assigns each filter in a high conv-layer with an object part during the learning process. Our method can be applied to different types of CNNs with different structures. The clear knowledge representation in an interpretable CNN can help people understand the logics inside a CNN, i.e., based on which patterns the CNN makes the decision. Experiments showed that filters in an interpretable CNN were more semantically meaningful than those in traditional CNNs.