Representation learning on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) has become a critical research problem in recent years. A typical example of a TAG is a paper citation graph, where the text of each paper serves as node attributes. Initial graph neural network (GNN) pipelines handled these text attributes by transforming them into shallow or hand-crafted features, such as skip-gram or bag-of-words features. Recent efforts have focused on enhancing these pipelines with language models (LMs), which typically demand intricate designs and substantial computational resources. With the advent of powerful large language models (LLMs) such as GPT or Llama2, which demonstrate an ability to reason and to utilize general knowledge, there is a growing need for techniques which combine the textual modelling abilities of LLMs with the structural learning capabilities of GNNs. Hence, in this work, we focus on leveraging LLMs to capture textual information as features, which can be used to boost GNN performance on downstream tasks. A key innovation is our use of explanations as features: we prompt an LLM to perform zero-shot classification, request textual explanations for its decision-making process, and design an LLM-to-LM interpreter to translate these explanations into informative features that enhance downstream GNNs. Our experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on well-established TAG datasets, including Cora, PubMed, ogbn-arxiv, as well as our newly introduced dataset, arXiv-2023. Furthermore, our method significantly speeds up training, achieving a 2.88 times improvement over the closest baseline on ogbn-arxiv. Lastly, we believe the versatility of the proposed method extends beyond TAGs and holds the potential to enhance other tasks involving graph-text data~\footnote{Our codes and datasets are available at: \url{//github.com/XiaoxinHe/TAPE}}.
Deep learning models often suffer from forgetting previously learned information when trained on new data. This problem is exacerbated in federated learning (FL), where the data is distributed and can change independently for each user. Many solutions are proposed to resolve this catastrophic forgetting in a centralized setting. However, they do not apply directly to FL because of its unique complexities, such as privacy concerns and resource limitations. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents a framework for $\textbf{federated class incremental learning}$ that utilizes a generative model to synthesize samples from past distributions. This data can be later exploited alongside the training data to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. To preserve privacy, the generative model is trained on the server using data-free methods at the end of each task without requesting data from clients. Moreover, our solution does not demand the users to store old data or models, which gives them the freedom to join/leave the training at any time. Additionally, we introduce SuperImageNet, a new regrouping of the ImageNet dataset specifically tailored for federated continual learning. We demonstrate significant improvements compared to existing baselines through extensive experiments on multiple datasets.
Graph representation learning is fundamental for analyzing graph-structured data. Exploring invariant graph representations remains a challenge for most existing graph representation learning methods. In this paper, we propose a cross-view graph consistency learning (CGCL) method that learns invariant graph representations for link prediction. First, two complementary augmented views are derived from an incomplete graph structure through a bidirectional graph structure augmentation scheme. This augmentation scheme mitigates the potential information loss that is commonly associated with various data augmentation techniques involving raw graph data, such as edge perturbation, node removal, and attribute masking. Second, we propose a CGCL model that can learn invariant graph representations. A cross-view training scheme is proposed to train the proposed CGCL model. This scheme attempts to maximize the consistency information between one augmented view and the graph structure reconstructed from the other augmented view. Furthermore, we offer a comprehensive theoretical CGCL analysis. This paper empirically and experimentally demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed CGCL method, achieving competitive results on graph datasets in comparisons with several state-of-the-art algorithms.
Existing graph contrastive learning (GCL) techniques typically require two forward passes for a single instance to construct the contrastive loss, which is effective for capturing the low-frequency signals of node features. Such a dual-pass design has shown empirical success on homophilic graphs, but its effectiveness on heterophilic graphs, where directly connected nodes typically have different labels, is unknown. In addition, existing GCL approaches fail to provide strong performance guarantees. Coupled with the unpredictability of GCL approaches on heterophilic graphs, their applicability in real-world contexts is limited. Then, a natural question arises: Can we design a GCL method that works for both homophilic and heterophilic graphs with a performance guarantee? To answer this question, we theoretically study the concentration property of features obtained by neighborhood aggregation on homophilic and heterophilic graphs, introduce the single-pass augmentation-free graph contrastive learning loss based on the property, and provide performance guarantees for the minimizer of the loss on downstream tasks. As a direct consequence of our analysis, we implement the Single-Pass Graph Contrastive Learning method (SP-GCL). Empirically, on 14 benchmark datasets with varying degrees of homophily, the features learned by the SP-GCL can match or outperform existing strong baselines with significantly less computational overhead, which demonstrates the usefulness of our findings in real-world cases.
Recently, pretraining methods for the Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been successful at learning effective representations from unlabeled graph data. However, most of these methods rely on pairwise relations in the graph and do not capture the underling higher-order relations between entities. Hypergraphs are versatile and expressive structures that can effectively model higher-order relationships among entities in the data. Despite the efforts to adapt GNNs to hypergraphs (HyperGNN), there are currently no fully self-supervised pretraining methods for HyperGNN on heterogeneous hypergraphs. In this paper, we present SPHH, a novel self-supervised pretraining framework for heterogeneous HyperGNNs. Our method is able to effectively capture higher-order relations among entities in the data in a self-supervised manner. SPHH is consist of two self-supervised pretraining tasks that aim to simultaneously learn both local and global representations of the entities in the hypergraph by using informative representations derived from the hypergraph structure. Overall, our work presents a significant advancement in the field of self-supervised pretraining of HyperGNNs, and has the potential to improve the performance of various graph-based downstream tasks such as node classification and link prediction tasks which are mapped to hypergraph configuration. Our experiments on two real-world benchmarks using four different HyperGNN models show that our proposed SPHH framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in various downstream tasks. The results demonstrate that SPHH is able to improve the performance of various HyperGNN models in various downstream tasks, regardless of their architecture or complexity, which highlights the robustness of our framework.
We study learning-based design of fair allocation mechanisms for divisible resources, using proportional fairness (PF) as a benchmark. The learning setting is a significant departure from the classic mechanism design literature, in that, we need to learn fair mechanisms solely from data. In particular, we consider the challenging problem of learning one-shot allocation mechanisms -- without the use of money -- that incentivize strategic agents to be truthful when reporting their valuations. It is well-known that the mechanism that directly seeks to optimize PF is not incentive compatible, meaning that the agents can potentially misreport their preferences to gain increased allocations. We introduce the notion of "exploitability" of a mechanism to measure the relative gain in utility from misreport, and make the following important contributions in the paper: (i) Using sophisticated techniques inspired by differentiable convex programming literature, we design a numerically efficient approach for computing the exploitability of the PF mechanism. This novel contribution enables us to quantify the gap that needs to be bridged to approximate PF via incentive compatible mechanisms. (ii) Next, we modify the PF mechanism to introduce a trade-off between fairness and exploitability. By properly controlling this trade-off using data, we show that our proposed mechanism, ExPF-Net, provides a strong approximation to the PF mechanism while maintaining low exploitability. This mechanism, however, comes with a high computational cost. (iii) To address the computational challenges, we propose another mechanism ExS-Net, which is end-to-end parameterized by a neural network. ExS-Net enjoys similar (slightly inferior) performance and significantly accelerated training and inference time performance. (iv) Extensive numerical simulations demonstrate the robustness and efficacy of the proposed mechanisms.
Deep learning has been the mainstream technique in natural language processing (NLP) area. However, the techniques require many labeled data and are less generalizable across domains. Meta-learning is an arising field in machine learning studying approaches to learn better learning algorithms. Approaches aim at improving algorithms in various aspects, including data efficiency and generalizability. Efficacy of approaches has been shown in many NLP tasks, but there is no systematic survey of these approaches in NLP, which hinders more researchers from joining the field. Our goal with this survey paper is to offer researchers pointers to relevant meta-learning works in NLP and attract more attention from the NLP community to drive future innovation. This paper first introduces the general concepts of meta-learning and the common approaches. Then we summarize task construction settings and application of meta-learning for various NLP problems and review the development of meta-learning in NLP community.
Deep learning has become the dominant approach in coping with various tasks in Natural LanguageProcessing (NLP). Although text inputs are typically represented as a sequence of tokens, there isa rich variety of NLP problems that can be best expressed with a graph structure. As a result, thereis a surge of interests in developing new deep learning techniques on graphs for a large numberof NLP tasks. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview onGraph Neural Networks(GNNs) for Natural Language Processing. We propose a new taxonomy of GNNs for NLP, whichsystematically organizes existing research of GNNs for NLP along three axes: graph construction,graph representation learning, and graph based encoder-decoder models. We further introducea large number of NLP applications that are exploiting the power of GNNs and summarize thecorresponding benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics, and open-source codes. Finally, we discussvarious outstanding challenges for making the full use of GNNs for NLP as well as future researchdirections. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive overview of Graph NeuralNetworks for Natural Language Processing.
There recently has been a surge of interest in developing a new class of deep learning (DL) architectures that integrate an explicit time dimension as a fundamental building block of learning and representation mechanisms. In turn, many recent results show that topological descriptors of the observed data, encoding information on the shape of the dataset in a topological space at different scales, that is, persistent homology of the data, may contain important complementary information, improving both performance and robustness of DL. As convergence of these two emerging ideas, we propose to enhance DL architectures with the most salient time-conditioned topological information of the data and introduce the concept of zigzag persistence into time-aware graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Zigzag persistence provides a systematic and mathematically rigorous framework to track the most important topological features of the observed data that tend to manifest themselves over time. To integrate the extracted time-conditioned topological descriptors into DL, we develop a new topological summary, zigzag persistence image, and derive its theoretical stability guarantees. We validate the new GCNs with a time-aware zigzag topological layer (Z-GCNETs), in application to traffic forecasting and Ethereum blockchain price prediction. Our results indicate that Z-GCNET outperforms 13 state-of-the-art methods on 4 time series datasets.
Semi-supervised learning on class-imbalanced data, although a realistic problem, has been under studied. While existing semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods are known to perform poorly on minority classes, we find that they still generate high precision pseudo-labels on minority classes. By exploiting this property, in this work, we propose Class-Rebalancing Self-Training (CReST), a simple yet effective framework to improve existing SSL methods on class-imbalanced data. CReST iteratively retrains a baseline SSL model with a labeled set expanded by adding pseudo-labeled samples from an unlabeled set, where pseudo-labeled samples from minority classes are selected more frequently according to an estimated class distribution. We also propose a progressive distribution alignment to adaptively adjust the rebalancing strength dubbed CReST+. We show that CReST and CReST+ improve state-of-the-art SSL algorithms on various class-imbalanced datasets and consistently outperform other popular rebalancing methods.
We study the problem of learning to reason in large scale knowledge graphs (KGs). More specifically, we describe a novel reinforcement learning framework for learning multi-hop relational paths: we use a policy-based agent with continuous states based on knowledge graph embeddings, which reasons in a KG vector space by sampling the most promising relation to extend its path. In contrast to prior work, our approach includes a reward function that takes the accuracy, diversity, and efficiency into consideration. Experimentally, we show that our proposed method outperforms a path-ranking based algorithm and knowledge graph embedding methods on Freebase and Never-Ending Language Learning datasets.