Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have fueled a surge of interest due to their superior performance on graph learning tasks, but are also shown vulnerability to adversarial attacks. In this paper, an effective graph structural attack is investigated to disrupt graph spectral filters in the Fourier domain. We define the spectral distance based on the eigenvalues of graph Laplacian to measure the disruption of spectral filters. We then generate edge perturbations by simultaneously maximizing a task-specific attack objective and the proposed spectral distance. The experiments demonstrate remarkable effectiveness of the proposed attack in the white-box setting at both training and test time. Our qualitative analysis shows the connection between the attack behavior and the imposed changes on the spectral distribution, which provides empirical evidence that maximizing spectral distance is an effective manner to change the structural property of graphs in the spatial domain and perturb the frequency components in the Fourier domain.
Causality can be described in terms of a structural causal model (SCM) that carries information on the variables of interest and their mechanistic relations. For most processes of interest the underlying SCM will only be partially observable, thus causal inference tries to leverage any exposed information. Graph neural networks (GNN) as universal approximators on structured input pose a viable candidate for causal learning, suggesting a tighter integration with SCM. To this effect we present a theoretical analysis from first principles that establishes a novel connection between GNN and SCM while providing an extended view on general neural-causal models. We then establish a new model class for GNN-based causal inference that is necessary and sufficient for causal effect identification. Our empirical illustration on simulations and standard benchmarks validate our theoretical proofs.
While many existing graph neural networks (GNNs) have been proven to perform $\ell_2$-based graph smoothing that enforces smoothness globally, in this work we aim to further enhance the local smoothness adaptivity of GNNs via $\ell_1$-based graph smoothing. As a result, we introduce a family of GNNs (Elastic GNNs) based on $\ell_1$ and $\ell_2$-based graph smoothing. In particular, we propose a novel and general message passing scheme into GNNs. This message passing algorithm is not only friendly to back-propagation training but also achieves the desired smoothing properties with a theoretical convergence guarantee. Experiments on semi-supervised learning tasks demonstrate that the proposed Elastic GNNs obtain better adaptivity on benchmark datasets and are significantly robust to graph adversarial attacks. The implementation of Elastic GNNs is available at \url{//github.com/lxiaorui/ElasticGNN}.
Learning structural representations of node sets from graph-structured data is crucial for applications ranging from node-role discovery to link prediction and molecule classification. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in structural representation learning. However, most GNNs are limited by the 1-Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) test and thus possible to generate identical representation for structures and graphs that are actually different. More powerful GNNs, proposed recently by mimicking higher-order-WL tests, only focus on entire-graph representations and cannot utilize sparsity of the graph structure to be computationally efficient. Here we propose a general class of structure-related features, termed Distance Encoding (DE), to assist GNNs in representing node sets with arbitrary sizes with strictly more expressive power than the 1-WL test. DE essentially captures the distance between the node set whose representation is to be learnt and each node in the graph, which includes important graph-related measures such as shortest-path-distance and generalized PageRank scores. We propose two general frameworks for GNNs to use DEs (1) as extra node attributes and (2) further as controllers of message aggregation in GNNs. Both frameworks may still utilize the sparse structure to keep scalability to process large graphs. In theory, we prove that these two frameworks can distinguish node sets embedded in almost all regular graphs where traditional GNNs always fail. We also rigorously analyze their limitations. Empirically, we evaluate these two frameworks on node structural roles prediction, link prediction and triangle prediction over six real networks. The results show that our models outperform GNNs without DEs by up-to 15% improvement in average accuracy and AUC. Our models also significantly outperform other SOTA baselines particularly designed for those tasks.
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 been widely used due to their outstanding performance in processing graph-structured data. However, the undirected graphs limit their application scope. In this paper, we extend spectral-based graph convolution to directed graphs by using first- and second-order proximity, which can not only retain the connection properties of the directed graph, but also expand the receptive field of the convolution operation. A new GCN model, called DGCN, is then designed to learn representations on the directed graph, leveraging both the first- and second-order proximity information. We empirically show the fact that GCNs working only with DGCNs can encode more useful information from graph and help achieve better performance when generalized to other models. Moreover, extensive experiments on citation networks and co-purchase datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model against the state-of-the-art methods.
This paper aims at revisiting Graph Convolutional Neural Networks by bridging the gap between spectral and spatial design of graph convolutions. We theoretically demonstrate some equivalence of the graph convolution process regardless it is designed in the spatial or the spectral domain. The obtained general framework allows to lead a spectral analysis of the most popular ConvGNNs, explaining their performance and showing their limits. Moreover, the proposed framework is used to design new convolutions in spectral domain with a custom frequency profile while applying them in the spatial domain. We also propose a generalization of the depthwise separable convolution framework for graph convolutional networks, what allows to decrease the total number of trainable parameters by keeping the capacity of the model. To the best of our knowledge, such a framework has never been used in the GNNs literature. Our proposals are evaluated on both transductive and inductive graph learning problems. Obtained results show the relevance of the proposed method and provide one of the first experimental evidence of transferability of spectral filter coefficients from one graph to another. Our source codes are publicly available at: //github.com/balcilar/Spectral-Designed-Graph-Convolutions
This paper focuses on the discrimination capacity of aggregation functions: these are the permutation invariant functions used by graph neural networks to combine the features of nodes. Realizing that the most powerful aggregation functions suffer from a dimensionality curse, we consider a restricted setting. In particular, we show that the standard sum and a novel histogram-based function have the capacity to discriminate between any fixed number of inputs chosen by an adversary. Based on our insights, we design a graph neural network aiming, not to maximize discrimination capacity, but to learn discriminative graph representations that generalize well. Our empirical evaluation provides evidence that our choices can yield benefits to the problem of structural graph classification.
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.
High spectral dimensionality and the shortage of annotations make hyperspectral image (HSI) classification a challenging problem. Recent studies suggest that convolutional neural networks can learn discriminative spatial features, which play a paramount role in HSI interpretation. However, most of these methods ignore the distinctive spectral-spatial characteristic of hyperspectral data. In addition, a large amount of unlabeled data remains an unexploited gold mine for efficient data use. Therefore, we proposed an integration of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and probabilistic graphical models for HSI classification. Specifically, we used a spectral-spatial generator and a discriminator to identify land cover categories of hyperspectral cubes. Moreover, to take advantage of a large amount of unlabeled data, we adopted a conditional random field to refine the preliminary classification results generated by GANs. Experimental results obtained using two commonly studied datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieved encouraging classification accuracy using a small number of data for training.