Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) can learn from typed and relational graph data more effectively than conventional GNNs. With larger parameter spaces, HGNNs may require more training data, which is often scarce in real-world applications due to privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR). Federated graph learning (FGL) enables multiple clients to train a GNN collaboratively without sharing their local data. However, existing FGL methods mainly focus on homogeneous GNNs or knowledge graph embeddings; few have considered heterogeneous graphs and HGNNs. In federated heterogeneous graph learning, clients may have private graph schemas. Conventional FL/FGL methods attempting to define a global HGNN model would violate schema privacy. To address these challenges, we propose FedHGN, a novel and general FGL framework for HGNNs. FedHGN adopts schema-weight decoupling to enable schema-agnostic knowledge sharing and employs coefficients alignment to stabilize the training process and improve HGNN performance. With better privacy preservation, FedHGN consistently outperforms local training and conventional FL methods on three widely adopted heterogeneous graph datasets with varying client numbers. The code is available at //github.com/cynricfu/FedHGN .
Federated Learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively learn a machine learning model without exchanging their own local data. In this way, the server can exploit the computational power of all clients and train the model on a larger set of data samples among all clients. Although such a mechanism is proven to be effective in various fields, existing works generally assume that each client preserves sufficient data for training. In practice, however, certain clients may only contain a limited number of samples (i.e., few-shot samples). For example, the available photo data taken by a specific user with a new mobile device is relatively rare. In this scenario, existing FL efforts typically encounter a significant performance drop on these clients. Therefore, it is urgent to develop a few-shot model that can generalize to clients with limited data under the FL scenario. In this paper, we refer to this novel problem as federated few-shot learning. Nevertheless, the problem remains challenging due to two major reasons: the global data variance among clients (i.e., the difference in data distributions among clients) and the local data insufficiency in each client (i.e., the lack of adequate local data for training). To overcome these two challenges, we propose a novel federated few-shot learning framework with two separately updated models and dedicated training strategies to reduce the adverse impact of global data variance and local data insufficiency. Extensive experiments on four prevalent datasets that cover news articles and images validate the effectiveness of our framework compared with the state-of-the-art baselines. Our code is provided at //github.com/SongW-SW/F2L.
Federated learning (FL) has been proposed to protect data privacy and virtually assemble the isolated data silos by cooperatively training models among organizations without breaching privacy and security. However, FL faces heterogeneity from various aspects, including data space, statistical, and system heterogeneity. For example, collaborative organizations without conflict of interest often come from different areas and have heterogeneous data from different feature spaces. Participants may also want to train heterogeneous personalized local models due to non-IID and imbalanced data distribution and various resource-constrained devices. Therefore, heterogeneous FL is proposed to address the problem of heterogeneity in FL. In this survey, we comprehensively investigate the domain of heterogeneous FL in terms of data space, statistical, system, and model heterogeneity. We first give an overview of FL, including its definition and categorization. Then, We propose a precise taxonomy of heterogeneous FL settings for each type of heterogeneity according to the problem setting and learning objective. We also investigate the transfer learning methodologies to tackle the heterogeneity in FL. We further present the applications of heterogeneous FL. Finally, we highlight the challenges and opportunities and envision promising future research directions toward new framework design and trustworthy approaches.
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine-learning paradigm, in which a global server iteratively averages the model parameters of local users without accessing their data. User heterogeneity has imposed significant challenges to FL, which can incur drifted global models that are slow to converge. Knowledge Distillation has recently emerged to tackle this issue, by refining the server model using aggregated knowledge from heterogeneous users, other than directly averaging their model parameters. This approach, however, depends on a proxy dataset, making it impractical unless such a prerequisite is satisfied. Moreover, the ensemble knowledge is not fully utilized to guide local model learning, which may in turn affect the quality of the aggregated model. Inspired by the prior art, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation} approach to address heterogeneous FL, where the server learns a lightweight generator to ensemble user information in a data-free manner, which is then broadcasted to users, regulating local training using the learned knowledge as an inductive bias. Empirical studies powered by theoretical implications show that, our approach facilitates FL with better generalization performance using fewer communication rounds, compared with the state-of-the-art.
Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) as an emerging technique have shown superior capacity of dealing with heterogeneous information network (HIN). However, most HGNNs follow a semi-supervised learning manner, which notably limits their wide use in reality since labels are usually scarce in real applications. Recently, contrastive learning, a self-supervised method, becomes one of the most exciting learning paradigms and shows great potential when there are no labels. In this paper, we study the problem of self-supervised HGNNs and propose a novel co-contrastive learning mechanism for HGNNs, named HeCo. Different from traditional contrastive learning which only focuses on contrasting positive and negative samples, HeCo employs cross-viewcontrastive mechanism. Specifically, two views of a HIN (network schema and meta-path views) are proposed to learn node embeddings, so as to capture both of local and high-order structures simultaneously. Then the cross-view contrastive learning, as well as a view mask mechanism, is proposed, which is able to extract the positive and negative embeddings from two views. This enables the two views to collaboratively supervise each other and finally learn high-level node embeddings. Moreover, two extensions of HeCo are designed to generate harder negative samples with high quality, which further boosts the performance of HeCo. Extensive experiments conducted on a variety of real-world networks show the superior performance of the proposed methods over the state-of-the-arts.
Federated learning enables multiple parties to collaboratively train a machine learning model without communicating their local data. A key challenge in federated learning is to handle the heterogeneity of local data distribution across parties. Although many studies have been proposed to address this challenge, we find that they fail to achieve high performance in image datasets with deep learning models. In this paper, we propose MOON: model-contrastive federated learning. MOON is a simple and effective federated learning framework. The key idea of MOON is to utilize the similarity between model representations to correct the local training of individual parties, i.e., conducting contrastive learning in model-level. Our extensive experiments show that MOON significantly outperforms the other state-of-the-art federated learning algorithms on various image classification tasks.
Since real-world objects and their interactions are often multi-modal and multi-typed, heterogeneous networks have been widely used as a more powerful, realistic, and generic superclass of traditional homogeneous networks (graphs). Meanwhile, representation learning (\aka~embedding) has recently been intensively studied and shown effective for various network mining and analytical tasks. In this work, we aim to provide a unified framework to deeply summarize and evaluate existing research on heterogeneous network embedding (HNE), which includes but goes beyond a normal survey. Since there has already been a broad body of HNE algorithms, as the first contribution of this work, we provide a generic paradigm for the systematic categorization and analysis over the merits of various existing HNE algorithms. Moreover, existing HNE algorithms, though mostly claimed generic, are often evaluated on different datasets. Understandable due to the application favor of HNE, such indirect comparisons largely hinder the proper attribution of improved task performance towards effective data preprocessing and novel technical design, especially considering the various ways possible to construct a heterogeneous network from real-world application data. Therefore, as the second contribution, we create four benchmark datasets with various properties regarding scale, structure, attribute/label availability, and \etc.~from different sources, towards handy and fair evaluations of HNE algorithms. As the third contribution, we carefully refactor and amend the implementations and create friendly interfaces for 13 popular HNE algorithms, and provide all-around comparisons among them over multiple tasks and experimental settings.
Graph Neural Networks (GNN) has demonstrated the superior performance in many challenging applications, including the few-shot learning tasks. Despite its powerful capacity to learn and generalize from few samples, GNN usually suffers from severe over-fitting and over-smoothing as the model becomes deep, which limit the model scalability. In this work, we propose a novel Attentive GNN to tackle these challenges, by incorporating a triple-attention mechanism, \ie node self-attention, neighborhood attention, and layer memory attention. We explain why the proposed attentive modules can improve GNN for few-shot learning with theoretical analysis and illustrations. Extensive experiments show that the proposed Attentive GNN outperforms the state-of-the-art GNN-based methods for few-shot learning over the mini-ImageNet and Tiered-ImageNet datasets, with both inductive and transductive settings.
Recent years have witnessed the emerging success of graph neural networks (GNNs) for modeling structured data. However, most GNNs are designed for homogeneous graphs, in which all nodes and edges belong to the same types, making them infeasible to represent heterogeneous structures. In this paper, we present the Heterogeneous Graph Transformer (HGT) architecture for modeling Web-scale heterogeneous graphs. To model heterogeneity, we design node- and edge-type dependent parameters to characterize the heterogeneous attention over each edge, empowering HGT to maintain dedicated representations for different types of nodes and edges. To handle dynamic heterogeneous graphs, we introduce the relative temporal encoding technique into HGT, which is able to capture the dynamic structural dependency with arbitrary durations. To handle Web-scale graph data, we design the heterogeneous mini-batch graph sampling algorithm---HGSampling---for efficient and scalable training. Extensive experiments on the Open Academic Graph of 179 million nodes and 2 billion edges show that the proposed HGT model consistently outperforms all the state-of-the-art GNN baselines by 9%--21% on various downstream tasks.
A large number of real-world graphs or networks are inherently heterogeneous, involving a diversity of node types and relation types. Heterogeneous graph embedding is to embed rich structural and semantic information of a heterogeneous graph into low-dimensional node representations. Existing models usually define multiple metapaths in a heterogeneous graph to capture the composite relations and guide neighbor selection. However, these models either omit node content features, discard intermediate nodes along the metapath, or only consider one metapath. To address these three limitations, we propose a new model named Metapath Aggregated Graph Neural Network (MAGNN) to boost the final performance. Specifically, MAGNN employs three major components, i.e., the node content transformation to encapsulate input node attributes, the intra-metapath aggregation to incorporate intermediate semantic nodes, and the inter-metapath aggregation to combine messages from multiple metapaths. Extensive experiments on three real-world heterogeneous graph datasets for node classification, node clustering, and link prediction show that MAGNN achieves more accurate prediction results than state-of-the-art baselines.
Graph representation learning is to learn universal node representations that preserve both node attributes and structural information. The derived node representations can be used to serve various downstream tasks, such as node classification and node clustering. When a graph is heterogeneous, the problem becomes more challenging than the homogeneous graph node learning problem. Inspired by the emerging information theoretic-based learning algorithm, in this paper we propose an unsupervised graph neural network Heterogeneous Deep Graph Infomax (HDGI) for heterogeneous graph representation learning. We use the meta-path structure to analyze the connections involving semantics in heterogeneous graphs and utilize graph convolution module and semantic-level attention mechanism to capture local representations. By maximizing local-global mutual information, HDGI effectively learns high-level node representations that can be utilized in downstream graph-related tasks. Experiment results show that HDGI remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised graph representation learning methods on both classification and clustering tasks. By feeding the learned representations into a parametric model, such as logistic regression, we even achieve comparable performance in node classification tasks when comparing with state-of-the-art supervised end-to-end GNN models.