Contrastive learning, as a self-supervised learning paradigm, becomes popular for Multivariate Time-Series (MTS) classification. It ensures the consistency across different views of unlabeled samples and then learns effective representations for these samples. Existing contrastive learning methods mainly focus on achieving temporal consistency with temporal augmentation and contrasting techniques, aiming to preserve temporal patterns against perturbations for MTS data. However, they overlook spatial consistency that requires the stability of individual sensors and their correlations. As MTS data typically originate from multiple sensors, ensuring spatial consistency becomes essential for the overall performance of contrastive learning on MTS data. Thus, we propose Graph Contextual Contrasting (GCC) for spatial consistency across MTS data. Specifically, we propose graph augmentations including node and edge augmentations to preserve the stability of sensors and their correlations, followed by graph contrasting with both node- and graph-level contrasting to extract robust sensor- and global-level features. We further introduce multi-window temporal contrasting to ensure temporal consistency in the data for each sensor. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed GCC achieves state-of-the-art performance on various MTS classification tasks.
Self-supervised learning (SSL) as an effective paradigm of representation learning has achieved tremendous success on various curated datasets in diverse scenarios. Nevertheless, when facing the long-tailed distribution in real-world applications, it is still hard for existing methods to capture transferable and robust representation. Conventional SSL methods, pursuing sample-level uniformity, easily leads to representation learning disparity where head classes dominate the feature regime but tail classes passively collapse. To address this problem, we propose a novel Geometric Harmonization (GH) method to encourage category-level uniformity in representation learning, which is more benign to the minority and almost does not hurt the majority under long-tailed distribution. Specially, GH measures the population statistics of the embedding space on top of self-supervised learning, and then infer an fine-grained instance-wise calibration to constrain the space expansion of head classes and avoid the passive collapse of tail classes. Our proposal does not alter the setting of SSL and can be easily integrated into existing methods in a low-cost manner. Extensive results on a range of benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of GH with high tolerance to the distribution skewness. Our code is available at //github.com/MediaBrain-SJTU/Geometric-Harmonization.
Math Word Problems (MWP) aims to automatically solve mathematical questions given in texts. Previous studies tend to design complex models to capture additional information in the original text so as to enable the model to gain more comprehensive features. In this paper, we turn our attention in the opposite direction, and work on how to discard redundant features containing spurious correlations for MWP. To this end, we design an Expression Syntax Information Bottleneck method for MWP (called ESIB) based on variational information bottleneck, which extracts essential features of expression syntax tree while filtering latent-specific redundancy containing syntax-irrelevant features. The key idea of ESIB is to encourage multiple models to predict the same expression syntax tree for different problem representations of the same problem by mutual learning so as to capture consistent information of expression syntax tree and discard latent-specific redundancy. To improve the generalization ability of the model and generate more diverse expressions, we design a self-distillation loss to encourage the model to rely more on the expression syntax information in the latent space. Experimental results on two large-scale benchmarks show that our model not only achieves state-of-the-art results but also generates more diverse solutions. The code is available.
With the rapid development of deep learning, training Big Models (BMs) for multiple downstream tasks becomes a popular paradigm. Researchers have achieved various outcomes in the construction of BMs and the BM application in many fields. At present, there is a lack of research work that sorts out the overall progress of BMs and guides the follow-up research. In this paper, we cover not only the BM technologies themselves but also the prerequisites for BM training and applications with BMs, dividing the BM review into four parts: Resource, Models, Key Technologies and Application. We introduce 16 specific BM-related topics in those four parts, they are Data, Knowledge, Computing System, Parallel Training System, Language Model, Vision Model, Multi-modal Model, Theory&Interpretability, Commonsense Reasoning, Reliability&Security, Governance, Evaluation, Machine Translation, Text Generation, Dialogue and Protein Research. In each topic, we summarize clearly the current studies and propose some future research directions. At the end of this paper, we conclude the further development of BMs in a more general view.
Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has achieved extraordinary success in learning effective task-specific representations of nodes in graphs. However, regarding Heterogeneous Information Network (HIN), existing HIN-oriented GCN methods still suffer from two deficiencies: (1) they cannot flexibly explore all possible meta-paths and extract the most useful ones for a target object, which hinders both effectiveness and interpretability; (2) they often need to generate intermediate meta-path based dense graphs, which leads to high computational complexity. To address the above issues, we propose an interpretable and efficient Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Network (ie-HGCN) to learn the representations of objects in HINs. It is designed as a hierarchical aggregation architecture, i.e., object-level aggregation first, followed by type-level aggregation. The novel architecture can automatically extract useful meta-paths for each object from all possible meta-paths (within a length limit), which brings good model interpretability. It can also reduce the computational cost by avoiding intermediate HIN transformation and neighborhood attention. We provide theoretical analysis about the proposed ie-HGCN in terms of evaluating the usefulness of all possible meta-paths, its connection to the spectral graph convolution on HINs, and its quasi-linear time complexity. Extensive experiments on three real network datasets demonstrate the superiority of ie-HGCN over the state-of-the-art methods.
Geometric deep learning (GDL), which is based on neural network architectures that incorporate and process symmetry information, has emerged as a recent paradigm in artificial intelligence. GDL bears particular promise in molecular modeling applications, in which various molecular representations with different symmetry properties and levels of abstraction exist. This review provides a structured and harmonized overview of molecular GDL, highlighting its applications in drug discovery, chemical synthesis prediction, and quantum chemistry. Emphasis is placed on the relevance of the learned molecular features and their complementarity to well-established molecular descriptors. This review provides an overview of current challenges and opportunities, and presents a forecast of the future of GDL for molecular sciences.
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 (GNN) is an emerging field for learning on non-Euclidean data. Recently, there has been increased interest in designing GNN that scales to large graphs. Most existing methods use "graph sampling" or "layer-wise sampling" techniques to reduce training time. However, these methods still suffer from degrading performance and scalability problems when applying to graphs with billions of edges. This paper presents GBP, a scalable GNN that utilizes a localized bidirectional propagation process from both the feature vectors and the training/testing nodes. Theoretical analysis shows that GBP is the first method that achieves sub-linear time complexity for both the precomputation and the training phases. An extensive empirical study demonstrates that GBP achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly less training/testing time. Most notably, GBP can deliver superior performance on a graph with over 60 million nodes and 1.8 billion edges in less than half an hour on a single machine.
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 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.
Deep learning has yielded state-of-the-art performance on many natural language processing tasks including named entity recognition (NER). However, this typically requires large amounts of labeled data. In this work, we demonstrate that the amount of labeled training data can be drastically reduced when deep learning is combined with active learning. While active learning is sample-efficient, it can be computationally expensive since it requires iterative retraining. To speed this up, we introduce a lightweight architecture for NER, viz., the CNN-CNN-LSTM model consisting of convolutional character and word encoders and a long short term memory (LSTM) tag decoder. The model achieves nearly state-of-the-art performance on standard datasets for the task while being computationally much more efficient than best performing models. We carry out incremental active learning, during the training process, and are able to nearly match state-of-the-art performance with just 25\% of the original training data.