Neural networks that process the parameters of other neural networks find applications in domains as diverse as classifying implicit neural representations, generating neural network weights, and predicting generalization errors. However, existing approaches either overlook the inherent permutation symmetry in the neural network or rely on intricate weight-sharing patterns to achieve equivariance, while ignoring the impact of the network architecture itself. In this work, we propose to represent neural networks as computational graphs of parameters, which allows us to harness powerful graph neural networks and transformers that preserve permutation symmetry. Consequently, our approach enables a single model to encode neural computational graphs with diverse architectures. We showcase the effectiveness of our method on a wide range of tasks, including classification and editing of implicit neural representations, predicting generalization performance, and learning to optimize, while consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods. The source code is open-sourced at //github.com/mkofinas/neural-graphs.
Social recommender systems (SocialRS) simultaneously leverage the user-to-item interactions as well as the user-to-user social relations for the task of generating item recommendations to users. Additionally exploiting social relations is clearly effective in understanding users' tastes due to the effects of homophily and social influence. For this reason, SocialRS has increasingly attracted attention. In particular, with the advance of graph neural networks (GNN), many GNN-based SocialRS methods have been developed recently. Therefore, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic review of the literature on GNN-based SocialRS. In this survey, we first identify 84 papers on GNN-based SocialRS after annotating 2151 papers by following the PRISMA framework (preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses). Then, we comprehensively review them in terms of their inputs and architectures to propose a novel taxonomy: (1) input taxonomy includes 5 groups of input type notations and 7 groups of input representation notations; (2) architecture taxonomy includes 8 groups of GNN encoder notations, 2 groups of decoder notations, and 12 groups of loss function notations. We classify the GNN-based SocialRS methods into several categories as per the taxonomy and describe their details. Furthermore, we summarize benchmark datasets and metrics widely used to evaluate the GNN-based SocialRS methods. Finally, we conclude this survey by presenting some future research directions. GitHub repository with the curated list of papers are available at //github.com/claws-lab/awesome-GNN-social-recsys.
The need to protect sensitive information privacy duringinformation exchange over the internet/intranet has led towider adoption of cryptography and steganography. The cryptography approaches convert the information into an unreadable format however draws the attention of cryptanalyst owing to the uncommon random nature flow of the bytes when viewing the flowing structured bytes on a computer. While steganography, in contrast, conceals the very existence of covert communication using digital media. Although any digital media (text, image, video, audio) can covey the sensitive information, the media with higher redundant bits are more favorable for embedding the sensitive information without distorting the media. Digital images are majorly used in conveying sensitive information compared to others owing to their higher rate of tolerating distortions, highly available, smaller sizes with high redundant bits. However, the need for maximizing the redundancy bits for the optimum embedding of secret information has been a paramount issue due to the imperceptibility prerequisite which deteriorates with an increase in payload thus, resulting in a tradeoff. This has limited steganography to only applications with lower payload requirements, thus limiting the adoption for wider deployment. This paper critically analyzes the current steganographic techniques, recent trends, and challenges.
Deep neural networks are an attractive alternative for simulating complex dynamical systems, as in comparison to traditional scientific computing methods, they offer reduced computational costs during inference and can be trained directly from observational data. Existing methods, however, cannot extrapolate accurately and are prone to error accumulation in long-time integration. Herein, we address this issue by combining neural operators with recurrent neural networks, learning the operator mapping, while offering a recurrent structure to capture temporal dependencies. The integrated framework is shown to stabilize the solution and reduce error accumulation for both interpolation and extrapolation of the Korteweg-de Vries equation.
The specification of a covariance function is of paramount importance when employing Gaussian process models, but the requirement of positive definiteness severely limits those used in practice. Designing flexible stationary covariance functions is, however, straightforward in the spectral domain, where one needs only to supply a positive and symmetric spectral density. In this work, we introduce an adaptive integration framework for efficiently and accurately evaluating covariance functions and their derivatives at irregular locations directly from \textit{any} continuous, integrable spectral density. In order to make this approach computationally tractable, we employ high-order panel quadrature, the nonuniform fast Fourier transform, and a Nyquist-informed panel selection heuristic, and derive novel algebraic truncation error bounds which are used to monitor convergence. As a result, we demonstrate several orders of magnitude speedup compared to naive uniform quadrature approaches, allowing us to evaluate covariance functions from slowly decaying, singular spectral densities at millions of locations to a user-specified tolerance in seconds on a laptop. We then apply our methodology to perform gradient-based maximum likelihood estimation using a previously numerically infeasible long-memory spectral model for wind velocities below the atmospheric boundary layer.
Federated Learning is increasingly used in domains such as healthcare to facilitate collaborative model training without data-sharing. However, datasets located in different sites are often non-identically distributed, leading to degradation of model performance in FL. Most existing methods for assessing these distribution shifts are limited by being dataset or task-specific. Moreover, these metrics can only be calculated by exchanging data, a practice restricted in many FL scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a novel metric for assessing dataset similarity. Our metric exhibits several desirable properties for FL: it is dataset-agnostic, is calculated in a privacy-preserving manner, and is computationally efficient, requiring no model training. In this paper, we first establish a theoretical connection between our metric and training dynamics in FL. Next, we extensively evaluate our metric on a range of datasets including synthetic, benchmark, and medical imaging datasets. We demonstrate that our metric shows a robust and interpretable relationship with model performance and can be calculated in privacy-preserving manner. As the first federated dataset similarity metric, we believe this metric can better facilitate successful collaborations between sites.
For many multiagent control problems, neural networks (NNs) have enabled promising new capabilities. However, many of these systems lack formal guarantees (e.g., collision avoidance, robustness), which prevents leveraging these advances in safety-critical settings. While there is recent work on formal verification of NN-controlled systems, most existing techniques cannot handle scenarios with more than one agent. To address this research gap, this paper presents a backward reachability-based approach for verifying the collision avoidance properties of Multi-Agent Neural Feedback Loops (MA-NFLs). Given the dynamics models and trained control policies of each agent, the proposed algorithm computes relative backprojection sets by (simultaneously) solving a series of Mixed Integer Linear Programs (MILPs) offline for each pair of agents. We account for state measurement uncertainties, making it well aligned with real-world scenarios. Using those results, the agents can quickly check for collision avoidance online by solving low-dimensional Linear Programs (LPs). We demonstrate the proposed algorithm can verify collision-free properties of a MA-NFL with agents trained to imitate a collision avoidance algorithm (Reciprocal Velocity Obstacles). We further demonstrate the computational scalability of the approach on systems with up to 10 agents.
What is learned by sophisticated neural network agents such as AlphaZero? This question is of both scientific and practical interest. If the representations of strong neural networks bear no resemblance to human concepts, our ability to understand faithful explanations of their decisions will be restricted, ultimately limiting what we can achieve with neural network interpretability. In this work we provide evidence that human knowledge is acquired by the AlphaZero neural network as it trains on the game of chess. By probing for a broad range of human chess concepts we show when and where these concepts are represented in the AlphaZero network. We also provide a behavioural analysis focusing on opening play, including qualitative analysis from chess Grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik. Finally, we carry out a preliminary investigation looking at the low-level details of AlphaZero's representations, and make the resulting behavioural and representational analyses available online.
Deep neural networks have revolutionized many machine learning tasks in power systems, ranging from pattern recognition to signal processing. The data in these tasks is typically represented in Euclidean domains. Nevertheless, there is an increasing number of applications in power systems, where data are collected from non-Euclidean domains and represented as the graph-structured data with high dimensional features and interdependency among nodes. The complexity of graph-structured data has brought significant challenges to the existing deep neural networks defined in Euclidean domains. Recently, many studies on extending deep neural networks for graph-structured data in power systems have emerged. In this paper, a comprehensive overview of graph neural networks (GNNs) in power systems is proposed. Specifically, several classical paradigms of GNNs structures (e.g., graph convolutional networks, graph recurrent neural networks, graph attention networks, graph generative networks, spatial-temporal graph convolutional networks, and hybrid forms of GNNs) are summarized, and key applications in power systems such as fault diagnosis, power prediction, power flow calculation, and data generation are reviewed in detail. Furthermore, main issues and some research trends about the applications of GNNs in power systems are discussed.
Attention Model has now become an important concept in neural networks that has been researched within diverse application domains. This survey provides a structured and comprehensive overview of the developments in modeling attention. In particular, we propose a taxonomy which groups existing techniques into coherent categories. We review the different neural architectures in which attention has been incorporated, and also show how attention improves interpretability of neural models. Finally, we discuss some applications in which modeling attention has a significant impact. We hope this survey will provide a succinct introduction to attention models and guide practitioners while developing approaches for their applications.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been found to be vulnerable to adversarial examples resulting from adding small-magnitude perturbations to inputs. Such adversarial examples can mislead DNNs to produce adversary-selected results. Different attack strategies have been proposed to generate adversarial examples, but how to produce them with high perceptual quality and more efficiently requires more research efforts. In this paper, we propose AdvGAN to generate adversarial examples with generative adversarial networks (GANs), which can learn and approximate the distribution of original instances. For AdvGAN, once the generator is trained, it can generate adversarial perturbations efficiently for any instance, so as to potentially accelerate adversarial training as defenses. We apply AdvGAN in both semi-whitebox and black-box attack settings. In semi-whitebox attacks, there is no need to access the original target model after the generator is trained, in contrast to traditional white-box attacks. In black-box attacks, we dynamically train a distilled model for the black-box model and optimize the generator accordingly. Adversarial examples generated by AdvGAN on different target models have high attack success rate under state-of-the-art defenses compared to other attacks. Our attack has placed the first with 92.76% accuracy on a public MNIST black-box attack challenge.