Over-squashing and over-smoothing are two critical issues, that limit the capabilities of graph neural networks (GNNs). While over-smoothing eliminates the differences between nodes making them indistinguishable, over-squashing refers to the inability of GNNs to propagate information over long distances, as exponentially many node states are squashed into fixed-size representations. Both phenomena share similar causes, as both are largely induced by the graph topology. To mitigate these problems in graph classification tasks, we propose CurvPool, a novel pooling method. CurvPool exploits the notion of curvature of a graph to adaptively identify structures responsible for both over-smoothing and over-squashing. By clustering nodes based on the Balanced Forman curvature, CurvPool constructs a graph with a more suitable structure, allowing deeper models and the combination of distant information. We compare it to other state-of-the-art pooling approaches and establish its competitiveness in terms of classification accuracy, computational complexity, and flexibility. CurvPool outperforms several comparable methods across all considered tasks. The most consistent results are achieved by pooling densely connected clusters using the sum aggregation, as this allows additional information about the size of each pool.
Scene completion and forecasting are two popular perception problems in research for mobile agents like autonomous vehicles. Existing approaches treat the two problems in isolation, resulting in a separate perception of the two aspects. In this paper, we introduce a novel LiDAR perception task of Occupancy Completion and Forecasting (OCF) in the context of autonomous driving to unify these aspects into a cohesive framework. This task requires new algorithms to address three challenges altogether: (1) sparse-to-dense reconstruction, (2) partial-to-complete hallucination, and (3) 3D-to-4D prediction. To enable supervision and evaluation, we curate a large-scale dataset termed OCFBench from public autonomous driving datasets. We analyze the performance of closely related existing baseline models and our own ones on our dataset. We envision that this research will inspire and call for further investigation in this evolving and crucial area of 4D perception. Our code for data curation and baseline implementation is available at //github.com/ai4ce/Occ4cast.
Haptic perception is highly important for immersive teleoperation of robots, especially for accomplishing manipulation tasks. We propose a low-cost haptic sensing and rendering system, which is capable of detecting and displaying surface roughness. As the robot fingertip moves across a surface of interest, two microphones capture sound coupled directly through the fingertip and through the air, respectively. A learning-based detector system analyzes the data in real time and gives roughness estimates with both high temporal resolution and low latency. Finally, an audio-based vibrational actuator displays the result to the human operator. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system through lab experiments and our winning entry in the ANA Avatar XPRIZE competition finals, where briefly trained judges solved a roughness-based selection task even without additional vision feedback. We publish our dataset used for training and evaluation together with our trained models to enable reproducibility of results.
The embedding of Biomedical Knowledge Graphs (BKGs) generates robust representations, valuable for a variety of artificial intelligence applications, including predicting drug combinations and reasoning disease-drug relationships. Meanwhile, contrastive learning (CL) is widely employed to enhance the distinctiveness of these representations. However, constructing suitable contrastive pairs for CL, especially within Knowledge Graphs (KGs), has been challenging. In this paper, we proposed a novel node-based contrastive learning method for knowledge graph embedding, NC-KGE. NC-KGE enhances knowledge extraction in embeddings and speeds up training convergence by constructing appropriate contrastive node pairs on KGs. This scheme can be easily integrated with other knowledge graph embedding (KGE) methods. For downstream task such as biochemical relationship prediction, we have incorporated a relation-aware attention mechanism into NC-KGE, focusing on the semantic relationships and node interactions. Extensive experiments show that NC-KGE performs competitively with state-of-the-art models on public datasets like FB15k-237 and WN18RR. Particularly in biomedical relationship prediction tasks, NC-KGE outperforms all baselines on datasets such as PharmKG8k-28, DRKG17k-21, and BioKG72k-14, especially in predicting drug combination relationships. We release our code at //github.com/zhi520/NC-KGE.
Biomedical named entity recognition is one of the core tasks in biomedical natural language processing (BioNLP). To tackle this task, numerous supervised/distantly supervised approaches have been proposed. Despite their remarkable success, these approaches inescapably demand laborious human effort. To alleviate the need of human effort, dictionary-based approaches have been proposed to extract named entities simply based on a given dictionary. However, one downside of existing dictionary-based approaches is that they are challenged to identify concept synonyms that are not listed in the given dictionary, which we refer as the synonym generalization problem. In this study, we propose a novel Synonym Generalization (SynGen) framework that recognizes the biomedical concepts contained in the input text using span-based predictions. In particular, SynGen introduces two regularization terms, namely, (1) a synonym distance regularizer; and (2) a noise perturbation regularizer, to minimize the synonym generalization error. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we provide a theoretical analysis of the bound of synonym generalization error. We extensively evaluate our approach on a wide range of benchmarks and the results verify that SynGen outperforms previous dictionary-based models by notable margins. Lastly, we provide a detailed analysis to further reveal the merits and inner-workings of our approach.
Link prediction on knowledge graphs (KGs) is a key research topic. Previous work mainly focused on binary relations, paying less attention to higher-arity relations although they are ubiquitous in real-world KGs. This paper considers link prediction upon n-ary relational facts and proposes a graph-based approach to this task. The key to our approach is to represent the n-ary structure of a fact as a small heterogeneous graph, and model this graph with edge-biased fully-connected attention. The fully-connected attention captures universal inter-vertex interactions, while with edge-aware attentive biases to particularly encode the graph structure and its heterogeneity. In this fashion, our approach fully models global and local dependencies in each n-ary fact, and hence can more effectively capture associations therein. Extensive evaluation verifies the effectiveness and superiority of our approach. It performs substantially and consistently better than current state-of-the-art across a variety of n-ary relational benchmarks. Our code is publicly available.
Search in social networks such as Facebook poses different challenges than in classical web search: besides the query text, it is important to take into account the searcher's context to provide relevant results. Their social graph is an integral part of this context and is a unique aspect of Facebook search. While embedding-based retrieval (EBR) has been applied in eb search engines for years, Facebook search was still mainly based on a Boolean matching model. In this paper, we discuss the techniques for applying EBR to a Facebook Search system. We introduce the unified embedding framework developed to model semantic embeddings for personalized search, and the system to serve embedding-based retrieval in a typical search system based on an inverted index. We discuss various tricks and experiences on end-to-end optimization of the whole system, including ANN parameter tuning and full-stack optimization. Finally, we present our progress on two selected advanced topics about modeling. We evaluated EBR on verticals for Facebook Search with significant metrics gains observed in online A/B experiments. We believe this paper will provide useful insights and experiences to help people on developing embedding-based retrieval systems in search engines.
In Multi-Label Text Classification (MLTC), one sample can belong to more than one class. It is observed that most MLTC tasks, there are dependencies or correlations among labels. Existing methods tend to ignore the relationship among labels. In this paper, a graph attention network-based model is proposed to capture the attentive dependency structure among the labels. The graph attention network uses a feature matrix and a correlation matrix to capture and explore the crucial dependencies between the labels and generate classifiers for the task. The generated classifiers are applied to sentence feature vectors obtained from the text feature extraction network (BiLSTM) to enable end-to-end training. Attention allows the system to assign different weights to neighbor nodes per label, thus allowing it to learn the dependencies among labels implicitly. The results of the proposed model are validated on five real-world MLTC datasets. The proposed model achieves similar or better performance compared to the previous state-of-the-art models.
Recommender systems are widely used in big information-based companies such as Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Netflix. A recommender system deals with the problem of information overload by filtering important information fragments according to users' preferences. In light of the increasing success of deep learning, recent studies have proved the benefits of using deep learning in various recommendation tasks. However, most proposed techniques only aim to target individuals, which cannot be efficiently applied in group recommendation. In this paper, we propose a deep learning architecture to solve the group recommendation problem. On the one hand, as different individual preferences in a group necessitate preference trade-offs in making group recommendations, it is essential that the recommendation model can discover substitutes among user behaviors. On the other hand, it has been observed that a user as an individual and as a group member behaves differently. To tackle such problems, we propose using an attention mechanism to capture the impact of each user in a group. Specifically, our model automatically learns the influence weight of each user in a group and recommends items to the group based on its members' weighted preferences. We conduct extensive experiments on four datasets. Our model significantly outperforms baseline methods and shows promising results in applying deep learning to the group recommendation problem.
Recently, ensemble has been applied to deep metric learning to yield state-of-the-art results. Deep metric learning aims to learn deep neural networks for feature embeddings, distances of which satisfy given constraint. In deep metric learning, ensemble takes average of distances learned by multiple learners. As one important aspect of ensemble, the learners should be diverse in their feature embeddings. To this end, we propose an attention-based ensemble, which uses multiple attention masks, so that each learner can attend to different parts of the object. We also propose a divergence loss, which encourages diversity among the learners. The proposed method is applied to the standard benchmarks of deep metric learning and experimental results show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin on image retrieval tasks.
Attention mechanism has been used as an ancillary means to help RNN or CNN. However, the Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017) recently recorded the state-of-the-art performance in machine translation with a dramatic reduction in training time by solely using attention. Motivated by the Transformer, Directional Self Attention Network (Shen et al., 2017), a fully attention-based sentence encoder, was proposed. It showed good performance with various data by using forward and backward directional information in a sentence. But in their study, not considered at all was the distance between words, an important feature when learning the local dependency to help understand the context of input text. We propose Distance-based Self-Attention Network, which considers the word distance by using a simple distance mask in order to model the local dependency without losing the ability of modeling global dependency which attention has inherent. Our model shows good performance with NLI data, and it records the new state-of-the-art result with SNLI data. Additionally, we show that our model has a strength in long sentences or documents.