This paper focuses on the problem of coflow scheduling with precedence constraints in identical parallel networks, which is a well-known $\mathcal{NP}$-hard problem. Coflow is a relatively new network abstraction used to characterize communication patterns in data centers. Both flow-level scheduling and coflow-level scheduling problems are examined, with the key distinction being the scheduling granularity. The proposed algorithm effectively determines the scheduling order of coflows by employing the primal-dual method. When considering workload sizes and weights that are dependent on the network topology in the input instances, our proposed algorithm for the flow-level scheduling problem achieves an approximation ratio of $O(\chi)$ where $\chi$ is the coflow number of the longest path in the directed acyclic graph (DAG). Additionally, when taking into account workload sizes that are topology-dependent, the algorithm achieves an approximation ratio of $O(R\chi)$, where $R$ represents the ratio of maximum weight to minimum weight. For the coflow-level scheduling problem, the proposed algorithm achieves an approximation ratio of $O(m\chi)$, where $m$ is the number of network cores, when considering workload sizes and weights that are topology-dependent. Moreover, when considering workload sizes that are topology-dependent, the algorithm achieves an approximation ratio of $O(Rm\chi)$. In the coflows of multi-stage job scheduling problem, the proposed algorithm achieves an approximation ratio of $O(\chi)$. Although our theoretical results are based on a limited set of input instances, experimental findings show that the results for general input instances outperform the theoretical results, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed algorithm.
Tackling unfairness in graph learning models is a challenging task, as the unfairness issues on graphs involve both attributes and topological structures. Existing work on fair graph learning simply assumes that attributes of all nodes are available for model training and then makes fair predictions. In practice, however, the attributes of some nodes might not be accessible due to missing data or privacy concerns, which makes fair graph learning even more challenging. In this paper, we propose FairAC, a fair attribute completion method, to complement missing information and learn fair node embeddings for graphs with missing attributes. FairAC adopts an attention mechanism to deal with the attribute missing problem and meanwhile, it mitigates two types of unfairness, i.e., feature unfairness from attributes and topological unfairness due to attribute completion. FairAC can work on various types of homogeneous graphs and generate fair embeddings for them and thus can be applied to most downstream tasks to improve their fairness performance. To our best knowledge, FairAC is the first method that jointly addresses the graph attribution completion and graph unfairness problems. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our method achieves better fairness performance with less sacrifice in accuracy, compared with the state-of-the-art methods of fair graph learning. Code is available at: //github.com/donglgcn/FairAC.
Unlike conventional grid and mesh based methods for solving partial differential equations (PDEs), neural networks have the potential to break the curse of dimensionality, providing approximate solutions to problems where using classical solvers is difficult or impossible. While global minimization of the PDE residual over the network parameters works well for boundary value problems, catastrophic forgetting impairs the applicability of this approach to initial value problems (IVPs). In an alternative local-in-time approach, the optimization problem can be converted into an ordinary differential equation (ODE) on the network parameters and the solution propagated forward in time; however, we demonstrate that current methods based on this approach suffer from two key issues. First, following the ODE produces an uncontrolled growth in the conditioning of the problem, ultimately leading to unacceptably large numerical errors. Second, as the ODE methods scale cubically with the number of model parameters, they are restricted to small neural networks, significantly limiting their ability to represent intricate PDE initial conditions and solutions. Building on these insights, we develop Neural IVP, an ODE based IVP solver which prevents the network from getting ill-conditioned and runs in time linear in the number of parameters, enabling us to evolve the dynamics of challenging PDEs with neural networks.
Unsupervised anomaly segmentation aims to detect patterns that are distinct from any patterns processed during training, commonly called abnormal or out-of-distribution patterns, without providing any associated manual segmentations. Since anomalies during deployment can lead to model failure, detecting the anomaly can enhance the reliability of models, which is valuable in high-risk domains like medical imaging. This paper introduces Masked Modality Cycles with Conditional Diffusion (MMCCD), a method that enables segmentation of anomalies across diverse patterns in multimodal MRI. The method is based on two fundamental ideas. First, we propose the use of cyclic modality translation as a mechanism for enabling abnormality detection. Image-translation models learn tissue-specific modality mappings, which are characteristic of tissue physiology. Thus, these learned mappings fail to translate tissues or image patterns that have never been encountered during training, and the error enables their segmentation. Furthermore, we combine image translation with a masked conditional diffusion model, which attempts to `imagine' what tissue exists under a masked area, further exposing unknown patterns as the generative model fails to recreate them. We evaluate our method on a proxy task by training on healthy-looking slices of BraTS2021 multi-modality MRIs and testing on slices with tumors. We show that our method compares favorably to previous unsupervised approaches based on image reconstruction and denoising with autoencoders and diffusion models.
When applying deep learning to remote sensing data in archaeological research, a notable obstacle is the limited availability of suitable datasets for training models. The application of transfer learning is frequently employed to mitigate this drawback. However, there is still a need to explore its effectiveness when applied across different archaeological datasets. This paper compares the performance of various transfer learning configurations using two semantic segmentation deep neural networks on two LiDAR datasets. The experimental results indicate that transfer learning-based approaches in archaeology can lead to performance improvements, although a systematic enhancement has not yet been observed. We provide specific insights about the validity of such techniques that can serve as a baseline for future works.
This papers proposes a generic, high-level methodology for generating forecast combinations that would deliver the optimal linearly combined forecast in terms of the mean-squared forecast error if one had access to two population quantities: the mean vector and the covariance matrix of the vector of individual forecast errors. We point out that this problem is identical to a mean-variance portfolio construction problem, in which portfolio weights correspond to forecast combination weights. We allow negative forecast weights and interpret such weights as hedging over and under estimation risks across estimators. This interpretation follows directly as an implication of the portfolio analogy. We demonstrate our method's improved out-of-sample performance relative to standard methods in combining tree forecasts to form weighted random forests in 14 data sets.
The main focus of this paper is the study of efficient multigrid methods for large linear systems with a particular saddle-point structure. Indeed, when the system matrix is symmetric, but indefinite, the variational convergence theory that is usually used to prove multigrid convergence cannot be directly applied. However, different algebraic approaches analyze properly preconditioned saddle-point problems, proving convergence of the Two-Grid method. In particular, this is efficient when the blocks of the coefficient matrix possess a Toeplitz or circulant structure. Indeed, it is possible to derive sufficient conditions for convergence and provide optimal parameters for the preconditioning of the saddle-point problem in terms of the associated generating symbols. In this paper, we propose a symbol-based convergence analysis for problems that have a hidden block Toeplitz structure. Then, they can be investigated focusing on the properties of the associated generating function f, which consequently is a matrix-valued function with dimension depending on the block size of the problem. As numerical tests we focus on the matrix sequence stemming from the finite element approximation of the Stokes problem. We show the efficiency of the methods studying the hidden 9-by-9 block multilevel structure of the obtained matrix sequence. Moreover, we propose an efficient algebraic multigrid method with convergence rate independent of the matrix size. Finally, we present several numerical tests comparing the results with state-of-the-art strategies.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
Sampling methods (e.g., node-wise, layer-wise, or subgraph) has become an indispensable strategy to speed up training large-scale Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, existing sampling methods are mostly based on the graph structural information and ignore the dynamicity of optimization, which leads to high variance in estimating the stochastic gradients. The high variance issue can be very pronounced in extremely large graphs, where it results in slow convergence and poor generalization. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the variance of sampling methods and show that, due to the composite structure of empirical risk, the variance of any sampling method can be decomposed into \textit{embedding approximation variance} in the forward stage and \textit{stochastic gradient variance} in the backward stage that necessities mitigating both types of variance to obtain faster convergence rate. We propose a decoupled variance reduction strategy that employs (approximate) gradient information to adaptively sample nodes with minimal variance, and explicitly reduces the variance introduced by embedding approximation. We show theoretically and empirically that the proposed method, even with smaller mini-batch sizes, enjoys a faster convergence rate and entails a better generalization compared to the existing methods.
Textual entailment is a fundamental task in natural language processing. Most approaches for solving the problem use only the textual content present in training data. A few approaches have shown that information from external knowledge sources like knowledge graphs (KGs) can add value, in addition to the textual content, by providing background knowledge that may be critical for a task. However, the proposed models do not fully exploit the information in the usually large and noisy KGs, and it is not clear how it can be effectively encoded to be useful for entailment. We present an approach that complements text-based entailment models with information from KGs by (1) using Personalized PageR- ank to generate contextual subgraphs with reduced noise and (2) encoding these subgraphs using graph convolutional networks to capture KG structure. Our technique extends the capability of text models exploiting structural and semantic information found in KGs. We evaluate our approach on multiple textual entailment datasets and show that the use of external knowledge helps improve prediction accuracy. This is particularly evident in the challenging BreakingNLI dataset, where we see an absolute improvement of 5-20% over multiple text-based entailment models.
We examine the problem of question answering over knowledge graphs, focusing on simple questions that can be answered by the lookup of a single fact. Adopting a straightforward decomposition of the problem into entity detection, entity linking, relation prediction, and evidence combination, we explore simple yet strong baselines. On the popular SimpleQuestions dataset, we find that basic LSTMs and GRUs plus a few heuristics yield accuracies that approach the state of the art, and techniques that do not use neural networks also perform reasonably well. These results show that gains from sophisticated deep learning techniques proposed in the literature are quite modest and that some previous models exhibit unnecessary complexity.