Motivated by alignment of correlated sparse random graphs, we introduce a hypothesis testing problem of deciding whether or not two random trees are correlated. We obtain sufficient conditions under which this testing is impossible or feasible. We propose MPAlign, a message-passing algorithm for graph alignment inspired by the tree correlation detection problem. We prove MPAlign to succeed in polynomial time at partial alignment whenever tree detection is feasible. As a result our analysis of tree detection reveals new ranges of parameters for which partial alignment of sparse random graphs is feasible in polynomial time. We then conjecture that graph alignment is not feasible in polynomial time when the associated tree detection problem is impossible. If true, this conjecture together with our sufficient conditions on tree detection impossibility would imply the existence of a hard phase for graph alignment, i.e. a parameter range where alignment cannot be done in polynomial time even though it is known to be feasible in non-polynomial time.
Anomaly detection among a large number of processes arises in many applications ranging from dynamic spectrum access to cybersecurity. In such problems one can often obtain noisy observations aggregated from a chosen subset of processes that conforms to a tree structure. The distribution of these observations, based on which the presence of anomalies is detected, may be only partially known. This gives rise to the need for a search strategy designed to account for both the sample complexity and the detection accuracy, as well as cope with statistical models that are known only up to some missing parameters. In this work we propose a sequential search strategy using two variations of the Generalized Local Likelihood Ratio statistic. Our proposed Hierarchical Dynamic Search (HDS) strategy is shown to be order-optimal with respect to the size of the search space and asymptotically optimal with respect to the detection accuracy. An explicit upper bound on the error probability of HDS is established for the finite sample regime. Extensive experiments are conducted, demonstrating the performance gains of HDS over existing methods.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are one of the most popular architectures that are used to solve classification problems accompanied by graphical information. We present a rigorous theoretical understanding of the effects of graph convolutions in multi-layer networks. We study these effects through the node classification problem of a non-linearly separable Gaussian mixture model coupled with a stochastic block model. First, we show that a single graph convolution expands the regime of the distance between the means where multi-layer networks can classify the data by a factor of at least $1/\sqrt[4]{\mathbb{E}{\rm deg}}$, where $\mathbb{E}{\rm deg}$ denotes the expected degree of a node. Second, we show that with a slightly stronger graph density, two graph convolutions improve this factor to at least $1/\sqrt[4]{n}$, where $n$ is the number of nodes in the graph. Finally, we provide both theoretical and empirical insights into the performance of graph convolutions placed in different combinations among the layers of a network, concluding that the performance is mutually similar for all combinations of the placement. We present extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world data that illustrate our results.
We describe a polynomial-time algorithm which, given a graph $G$ with treewidth $t$, approximates the pathwidth of $G$ to within a ratio of $O(t\sqrt{\log t})$. This is the first algorithm to achieve an $f(t)$-approximation for some function $f$. Our approach builds on the following key insight: every graph with large pathwidth has large treewidth or contains a subdivision of a large complete binary tree. Specifically, we show that every graph with pathwidth at least $th+2$ has treewidth at least $t$ or contains a subdivision of a complete binary tree of height $h+1$. The bound $th+2$ is best possible up to a multiplicative constant. This result was motivated by, and implies (with $c=2$), the following conjecture of Kawarabayashi and Rossman (SODA'18): there exists a universal constant $c$ such that every graph with pathwidth $\Omega(k^c)$ has treewidth at least $k$ or contains a subdivision of a complete binary tree of height $k$. Our main technical algorithm takes a graph $G$ and some (not necessarily optimal) tree decomposition of $G$ of width $t'$ in the input, and it computes in polynomial time an integer $h$, a certificate that $G$ has pathwidth at least $h$, and a path decomposition of $G$ of width at most $(t'+1)h+1$. The certificate is closely related to (and implies) the existence of a subdivision of a complete binary tree of height $h$. The approximation algorithm for pathwidth is then obtained by combining this algorithm with the approximation algorithm of Feige, Hajiaghayi, and Lee (STOC'05) for treewidth.
Traditional object detection answers two questions; "what" (what the object is?) and "where" (where the object is?). "what" part of the object detection can be fine-grained further i.e. "what type", "what shape" and "what material" etc. This results in the shifting of the object detection tasks to the object description paradigm. Describing an object provides additional detail that enables us to understand the characteristics and attributes of the object ("plastic boat" not just boat, "glass bottle" not just bottle). This additional information can implicitly be used to gain insight into unseen objects (e.g. unknown object is "metallic", "has wheels"), which is not possible in traditional object detection. In this paper, we present a new approach to simultaneously detect objects and infer their attributes, we call it Detect and Describe (DaD) framework. DaD is a deep learning-based approach that extends object detection to object attribute prediction as well. We train our model on aPascal train set and evaluate our approach on aPascal test set. We achieve 97.0% in Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC) for object attributes prediction on aPascal test set. We also show qualitative results for object attribute prediction on unseen objects, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for describing unknown objects.
Despite the recent progress, the existing multi-view unsupervised feature selection methods mostly suffer from two limitations. First, they generally utilize either cluster structure or similarity structure to guide the feature selection, neglecting the possibility of a joint formulation with mutual benefits. Second, they often learn the similarity structure by either global structure learning or local structure learning, lacking the capability of graph learning with both global and local structural awareness. In light of this, this paper presents a joint multi-view unsupervised feature selection and graph learning (JMVFG) approach. Particularly, we formulate the multi-view feature selection with orthogonal decomposition, where each target matrix is decomposed into a view-specific basis matrix and a view-consistent cluster indicator. Cross-space locality preservation is incorporated to bridge the cluster structure learning in the projected space and the similarity learning (i.e., graph learning) in the original space. Further, a unified objective function is presented to enable the simultaneous learning of the cluster structure, the global and local similarity structures, and the multi-view consistency and inconsistency, upon which an alternating optimization algorithm is developed with theoretically proved convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach for both multi-view feature selection and graph learning tasks.
A High-dimensional and sparse (HiDS) matrix is frequently encountered in a big data-related application like an e-commerce system or a social network services system. To perform highly accurate representation learning on it is of great significance owing to the great desire of extracting latent knowledge and patterns from it. Latent factor analysis (LFA), which represents an HiDS matrix by learning the low-rank embeddings based on its observed entries only, is one of the most effective and efficient approaches to this issue. However, most existing LFA-based models perform such embeddings on a HiDS matrix directly without exploiting its hidden graph structures, thereby resulting in accuracy loss. To address this issue, this paper proposes a graph-incorporated latent factor analysis (GLFA) model. It adopts two-fold ideas: 1) a graph is constructed for identifying the hidden high-order interaction (HOI) among nodes described by an HiDS matrix, and 2) a recurrent LFA structure is carefully designed with the incorporation of HOI, thereby improving the representa-tion learning ability of a resultant model. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that GLFA outperforms six state-of-the-art models in predicting the missing data of an HiDS matrix, which evidently supports its strong representation learning ability to HiDS data.
We study the robust matrix completion problem for the low-rank Hankel matrix, which detects the sparse corruptions caused by extreme outliers while we try to recover the original Hankel matrix from the partial observation. In this paper, we explore the convenient Hankel structure and propose a novel non-convex algorithm, coined Hankel Structured Gradient Descent (HSGD), for large-scale robust Hankel matrix completion problems. HSGD is highly computing- and sample-efficient compared to the state-of-the-arts. The recovery guarantee with a linear convergence rate has been established for HSGD under some mild assumptions. The empirical advantages of HSGD are verified on both synthetic datasets and real-world nuclear magnetic resonance signals.
Lane detection is a challenging task that requires predicting complex topology shapes of lane lines and distinguishing different types of lanes simultaneously. Earlier works follow a top-down roadmap to regress predefined anchors into various shapes of lane lines, which lacks enough flexibility to fit complex shapes of lanes due to the fixed anchor shapes. Lately, some works propose to formulate lane detection as a keypoint estimation problem to describe the shapes of lane lines more flexibly and gradually group adjacent keypoints belonging to the same lane line in a point-by-point manner, which is inefficient and time-consuming during postprocessing. In this paper, we propose a Global Association Network (GANet) to formulate the lane detection problem from a new perspective, where each keypoint is directly regressed to the starting point of the lane line instead of point-by-point extension. Concretely, the association of keypoints to their belonged lane line is conducted by predicting their offsets to the corresponding starting points of lanes globally without dependence on each other, which could be done in parallel to greatly improve efficiency. In addition, we further propose a Lane-aware Feature Aggregator (LFA), which adaptively captures the local correlations between adjacent keypoints to supplement local information to the global association. Extensive experiments on two popular lane detection benchmarks show that our method outperforms previous methods with F1 score of 79.63% on CULane and 97.71% on Tusimple dataset with high FPS. The code will be released at //github.com/Wolfwjs/GANet.
Humans have a natural instinct to identify unknown object instances in their environments. The intrinsic curiosity about these unknown instances aids in learning about them, when the corresponding knowledge is eventually available. This motivates us to propose a novel computer vision problem called: `Open World Object Detection', where a model is tasked to: 1) identify objects that have not been introduced to it as `unknown', without explicit supervision to do so, and 2) incrementally learn these identified unknown categories without forgetting previously learned classes, when the corresponding labels are progressively received. We formulate the problem, introduce a strong evaluation protocol and provide a novel solution, which we call ORE: Open World Object Detector, based on contrastive clustering and energy based unknown identification. Our experimental evaluation and ablation studies analyze the efficacy of ORE in achieving Open World objectives. As an interesting by-product, we find that identifying and characterizing unknown instances helps to reduce confusion in an incremental object detection setting, where we achieve state-of-the-art performance, with no extra methodological effort. We hope that our work will attract further research into this newly identified, yet crucial research direction.
This paper focuses on two fundamental tasks of graph analysis: community detection and node representation learning, which capture the global and local structures of graphs, respectively. In the current literature, these two tasks are usually independently studied while they are actually highly correlated. We propose a probabilistic generative model called vGraph to learn community membership and node representation collaboratively. Specifically, we assume that each node can be represented as a mixture of communities, and each community is defined as a multinomial distribution over nodes. Both the mixing coefficients and the community distribution are parameterized by the low-dimensional representations of the nodes and communities. We designed an effective variational inference algorithm which regularizes the community membership of neighboring nodes to be similar in the latent space. Experimental results on multiple real-world graphs show that vGraph is very effective in both community detection and node representation learning, outperforming many competitive baselines in both tasks. We show that the framework of vGraph is quite flexible and can be easily extended to detect hierarchical communities.