Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have made significant advances in detecting roads from satellite images. However, existing CNN approaches are generally repurposed semantic segmentation architectures and suffer from the poor delineation of long and curved regions. Lack of overall road topology and structure information further deteriorates their performance on challenging remote sensing images. This paper presents a novel multi-task graph neural network (GNN) which simultaneously detects both road regions and road borders; the inter-play between these two tasks unlocks superior performance from two perspectives: (1) the hierarchically detected road borders enable the network to capture and encode holistic road structure to enhance road connectivity (2) identifying the intrinsic correlation of semantic landcover regions mitigates the difficulty in recognizing roads cluttered by regions with similar appearance. Experiments on challenging dataset demonstrate that the proposed architecture can improve the road border delineation and road extraction accuracy compared with the existing methods.
Graphs are ubiquitous for modeling complex relationships between objects across various fields. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have become a mainstream technique for graph-based applications, but their performance heavily relies on abundant labeled data. To reduce labeling requirement, pre-training and prompt learning has become a popular alternative. However, most existing prompt methods do not differentiate homophilic and heterophilic characteristics of real-world graphs. In particular, many real-world graphs are non-homophilic, not strictly or uniformly homophilic with mixing homophilic and heterophilic patterns, exhibiting varying non-homophilic characteristics across graphs and nodes. In this paper, we propose ProNoG, a novel pre-training and prompt learning framework for such non-homophilic graphs. First, we analyze existing graph pre-training methods, providing theoretical insights into the choice of pre-training tasks. Second, recognizing that each node exhibits unique non-homophilic characteristics, we propose a conditional network to characterize the node-specific patterns in downstream tasks. Finally, we thoroughly evaluate and analyze ProNoG through extensive experiments on ten public datasets.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved impressive performance in graph domain adaptation. However, extensive source graphs could be unavailable in real-world scenarios due to privacy and storage concerns. To this end, we investigate an underexplored yet practical problem of source-free graph domain adaptation, which transfers knowledge from source models instead of source graphs to a target domain. To solve this problem, we introduce a novel GNN-based approach called Rank and Align (RNA), which ranks graph similarities with spectral seriation for robust semantics learning, and aligns inharmonic graphs with harmonic graphs which close to the source domain for subgraph extraction. In particular, to overcome label scarcity, we employ the spectral seriation algorithm to infer the robust pairwise rankings, which can guide semantic learning using a similarity learning objective. To depict distribution shifts, we utilize spectral clustering and the silhouette coefficient to detect harmonic graphs, which the source model can easily classify. To reduce potential domain discrepancy, we extract domain-invariant subgraphs from inharmonic graphs by an adversarial edge sampling process, which guides the invariant learning of GNNs. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed RNA.
Backdoor attacks on deep neural networks have emerged as significant security threats, especially as DNNs are increasingly deployed in security-critical applications. However, most existing works assume that the attacker has access to the original training data. This limitation restricts the practicality of launching such attacks in real-world scenarios. Additionally, using a specified trigger to activate the injected backdoor compromises the stealthiness of the attacks. To address these concerns, we propose a trigger-free backdoor attack that does not require access to any training data. Specifically, we design a novel fine-tuning approach that incorporates the concept of malicious data into the concept of the attacker-specified class, resulting the misclassification of trigger-free malicious data into the attacker-specified class. Furthermore, instead of relying on training data to preserve the model's knowledge, we employ knowledge distillation methods to maintain the performance of the infected model on benign samples, and introduce a parameter importance evaluation mechanism based on elastic weight constraints to facilitate the fine-tuning of the infected model. The effectiveness, practicality, and stealthiness of the proposed attack are comprehensively evaluated on three real-world datasets. Furthermore, we explore the potential for enhancing the attack through the use of auxiliary datasets and model inversion.
For decades, satellites have facilitated remote internet of things (IoT) services. However, the recent proliferation of increasingly capable sensors and a surge in the number deployed, has led to a substantial growth in the volume of data that needs to be transmitted via satellites. In response to this growing demand, free space optical communication systems have been proposed, as they allow for the use of large bandwidths of unlicensed spectrum, enabling high data rates. However, optical communications are highly vulnerable to weather-induced disruptions, thereby limiting their high potential. This paper proposes the use of high altitude platform station (HAPS) systems in conjunction with delay-tolerant networking techniques to increase the amount of data that can be transmitted to the ground from satellites when compared to the use of traditional ground station network architectures. The architectural proposal is evaluated in terms of delivery ratio and buffer occupancy, and the subsequent discussion analyzes the advantages, challenges and potential areas for future research.
With the rise of neural networks in various domains, multi-task learning (MTL) gained significant relevance. A key challenge in MTL is balancing individual task losses during neural network training to improve performance and efficiency through knowledge sharing across tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a novel task-weighting method by building on the most prevalent approach of Uncertainty Weighting and computing analytically optimal uncertainty-based weights, normalized by a softmax function with tunable temperature. Our approach yields comparable results to the combinatorially prohibitive, brute-force approach of Scalarization while offering a more cost-effective yet high-performing alternative. We conduct an extensive benchmark on various datasets and architectures. Our method consistently outperforms six other common weighting methods. Furthermore, we report noteworthy experimental findings for the practical application of MTL. For example, larger networks diminish the influence of weighting methods, and tuning the weight decay has a low impact compared to the learning rate.
The architectures of deep neural networks (DNN) rely heavily on the underlying grid structure of variables, for instance, the lattice of pixels in an image. For general high dimensional data with variables not associated with a grid, the multi-layer perceptron and deep belief network are often used. However, it is frequently observed that those networks do not perform competitively and they are not helpful for identifying important variables. In this paper, we propose a framework that imposes on blocks of variables a chain structure obtained by step-wise greedy search so that the DNN architecture can leverage the constructed grid. We call this new neural network Deep Variable-Block Chain (DVC). Because the variable blocks are used for classification in a sequential manner, we further develop the capacity of selecting variables adaptively according to a number of regions trained by a decision tree. Our experiments show that DVC outperforms other generic DNNs and other strong classifiers. Moreover, DVC can achieve high accuracy at much reduced dimensionality and sometimes reveals drastically different sets of relevant variables for different regions.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated a significant boost in prediction performance on graph data. At the same time, the predictions made by these models are often hard to interpret. In that regard, many efforts have been made to explain the prediction mechanisms of these models from perspectives such as GNNExplainer, XGNN and PGExplainer. Although such works present systematic frameworks to interpret GNNs, a holistic review for explainable GNNs is unavailable. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of explainability techniques developed for GNNs. We focus on explainable graph neural networks and categorize them based on the use of explainable methods. We further provide the common performance metrics for GNNs explanations and point out several future research directions.
Vast amount of data generated from networks of sensors, wearables, and the Internet of Things (IoT) devices underscores the need for advanced modeling techniques that leverage the spatio-temporal structure of decentralized data due to the need for edge computation and licensing (data access) issues. While federated learning (FL) has emerged as a framework for model training without requiring direct data sharing and exchange, effectively modeling the complex spatio-temporal dependencies to improve forecasting capabilities still remains an open problem. On the other hand, state-of-the-art spatio-temporal forecasting models assume unfettered access to the data, neglecting constraints on data sharing. To bridge this gap, we propose a federated spatio-temporal model -- Cross-Node Federated Graph Neural Network (CNFGNN) -- which explicitly encodes the underlying graph structure using graph neural network (GNN)-based architecture under the constraint of cross-node federated learning, which requires that data in a network of nodes is generated locally on each node and remains decentralized. CNFGNN operates by disentangling the temporal dynamics modeling on devices and spatial dynamics on the server, utilizing alternating optimization to reduce the communication cost, facilitating computations on the edge devices. Experiments on the traffic flow forecasting task show that CNFGNN achieves the best forecasting performance in both transductive and inductive learning settings with no extra computation cost on edge devices, while incurring modest communication cost.
It has been shown that deep neural networks are prone to overfitting on biased training data. Towards addressing this issue, meta-learning employs a meta model for correcting the training bias. Despite the promising performances, super slow training is currently the bottleneck in the meta learning approaches. In this paper, we introduce a novel Faster Meta Update Strategy (FaMUS) to replace the most expensive step in the meta gradient computation with a faster layer-wise approximation. We empirically find that FaMUS yields not only a reasonably accurate but also a low-variance approximation of the meta gradient. We conduct extensive experiments to verify the proposed method on two tasks. We show our method is able to save two-thirds of the training time while still maintaining the comparable or achieving even better generalization performance. In particular, our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and realistic noisy labels, and obtains promising performance on long-tailed recognition on standard benchmarks.
Convolutional networks (ConvNets) have achieved great successes in various challenging vision tasks. However, the performance of ConvNets would degrade when encountering the domain shift. The domain adaptation is more significant while challenging in the field of biomedical image analysis, where cross-modality data have largely different distributions. Given that annotating the medical data is especially expensive, the supervised transfer learning approaches are not quite optimal. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation framework with adversarial learning for cross-modality biomedical image segmentations. Specifically, our model is based on a dilated fully convolutional network for pixel-wise prediction. Moreover, we build a plug-and-play domain adaptation module (DAM) to map the target input to features which are aligned with source domain feature space. A domain critic module (DCM) is set up for discriminating the feature space of both domains. We optimize the DAM and DCM via an adversarial loss without using any target domain label. Our proposed method is validated by adapting a ConvNet trained with MRI images to unpaired CT data for cardiac structures segmentations, and achieved very promising results.