In recent years, benefiting from the expressive power of Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), significant breakthroughs have been made in face clustering area. However, rare attention has been paid to GCN-based clustering on imbalanced data. Although imbalance problem has been extensively studied, the impact of imbalanced data on GCN- based linkage prediction task is quite different, which would cause problems in two aspects: imbalanced linkage labels and biased graph representations. The former is similar to that in classic image classification task, but the latter is a particular problem in GCN-based clustering via linkage prediction. Significantly biased graph representations in training can cause catastrophic over-fitting of a GCN model. To tackle these challenges, we propose a linkage-based doubly imbalanced graph learning framework for face clustering. In this framework, we evaluate the feasibility of those existing methods for imbalanced image classification problem on GCNs, and present a new method to alleviate the imbalanced labels and also augment graph representations using a Reverse-Imbalance Weighted Sampling (RIWS) strategy. With the RIWS strategy, probability-based class balancing weights could ensure the overall distribution of positive and negative samples; in addition, weighted random sampling provides diverse subgraph structures, which effectively alleviates the over-fitting problem and improves the representation ability of GCNs. Extensive experiments on series of imbalanced benchmark datasets synthesized from MS-Celeb-1M and DeepFashion demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our proposed method. Our implementation and the synthesized datasets will be openly available on //github.com/espectre/GCNs_on_imbalanced_datasets.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown high potential for a variety of real-world, challenging applications, but one of the major obstacles in GNN research is the lack of large-scale flexible datasets. Most existing public datasets for GNNs are relatively small, which limits the ability of GNNs to generalize to unseen data. The few existing large-scale graph datasets provide very limited labeled data. This makes it difficult to determine if the GNN model's low accuracy for unseen data is inherently due to insufficient training data or if the model failed to generalize. Additionally, datasets used to train GNNs need to offer flexibility to enable a thorough study of the impact of various factors while training GNN models. In this work, we introduce the Illinois Graph Benchmark (IGB), a research dataset tool that the developers can use to train, scrutinize and systematically evaluate GNN models with high fidelity. IGB includes both homogeneous and heterogeneous graphs of enormous sizes, with more than 40% of their nodes labeled. Compared to the largest graph datasets publicly available, the IGB provides over 162X more labeled data for deep learning practitioners and developers to create and evaluate models with higher accuracy. The IGB dataset is designed to be flexible, enabling the study of various GNN architectures, embedding generation techniques, and analyzing system performance issues. IGB is open-sourced, supports DGL and PyG frameworks, and comes with releases of the raw text that we believe foster emerging language models and GNN research projects. An early public version of IGB is available at //github.com/IllinoisGraphBenchmark/IGB-Datasets.
Recently end-to-end neural audio/speech coding has shown its great potential to outperform traditional signal analysis based audio codecs. This is mostly achieved by following the VQ-VAE paradigm where blind features are learned, vector-quantized and coded. In this paper, instead of blind end-to-end learning, we propose to learn disentangled features for real-time neural speech coding. Specifically, more global-like speaker identity and local content features are learned with disentanglement to represent speech. Such a compact feature decomposition not only achieves better coding efficiency by exploiting bit allocation among different features but also provides the flexibility to do audio editing in embedding space, such as voice conversion in real-time communications. Both subjective and objective results demonstrate its coding efficiency and we find that the learned disentangled features show comparable performance on any-to-any voice conversion with modern self-supervised speech representation learning models with far less parameters and low latency, showing the potential of our neural coding framework.
Data imbalance is a common problem in machine learning that can have a critical effect on the performance of a model. Various solutions exist but their impact on the convergence of the learning dynamics is not understood. Here, we elucidate the significant negative impact of data imbalance on learning, showing that the learning curves for minority and majority classes follow sub-optimal trajectories when training with a gradient-based optimizer. This slowdown is related to the imbalance ratio and can be traced back to a competition between the optimization of different classes. Our main contribution is the analysis of the convergence of full-batch (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD), and of variants that renormalize the contribution of each per-class gradient. We find that GD is not guaranteed to decrease the loss for each class but that this problem can be addressed by performing a per-class normalization of the gradient. With SGD, class imbalance has an additional effect on the direction of the gradients: the minority class suffers from a higher directional noise, which reduces the effectiveness of the per-class gradient normalization. Our findings not only allow us to understand the potential and limitations of strategies involving the per-class gradients, but also the reason for the effectiveness of previously used solutions for class imbalance such as oversampling.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in node classification tasks. However, existing GNNs naturally bias towards the majority classes with more labelled data and ignore those minority classes with relatively few labelled ones. The traditional techniques often resort over-sampling methods, but they may cause overfitting problem. More recently, some works propose to synthesize additional nodes for minority classes from the labelled nodes, however, there is no any guarantee if those generated nodes really stand for the corresponding minority classes. In fact, improperly synthesized nodes may result in insufficient generalization of the algorithm. To resolve the problem, in this paper we seek to automatically augment the minority classes from the massive unlabelled nodes of the graph. Specifically, we propose \textit{GraphSR}, a novel self-training strategy to augment the minority classes with significant diversity of unlabelled nodes, which is based on a Similarity-based selection module and a Reinforcement Learning(RL) selection module. The first module finds a subset of unlabelled nodes which are most similar to those labelled minority nodes, and the second one further determines the representative and reliable nodes from the subset via RL technique. Furthermore, the RL-based module can adaptively determine the sampling scale according to current training data. This strategy is general and can be easily combined with different GNNs models. Our experiments demonstrate the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on various class-imbalanced datasets.
We consider a personalized pricing problem in which we have data consisting of feature information, historical pricing decisions, and binary realized demand. The goal is to perform off-policy evaluation for a new personalized pricing policy that maps features to prices. Methods based on inverse propensity weighting (including doubly robust methods) for off-policy evaluation may perform poorly when the logging policy has little exploration or is deterministic, which is common in pricing applications. Building on the balanced policy evaluation framework of Kallus (2018), we propose a new approach tailored to pricing applications. The key idea is to compute an estimate that minimizes the worst-case mean squared error or maximizes a worst-case lower bound on policy performance, where in both cases the worst-case is taken with respect to a set of possible revenue functions. We establish theoretical convergence guarantees and empirically demonstrate the advantage of our approach using a real-world pricing dataset.
With the explosive growth of information technology, multi-view graph data have become increasingly prevalent and valuable. Most existing multi-view clustering techniques either focus on the scenario of multiple graphs or multi-view attributes. In this paper, we propose a generic framework to cluster multi-view attributed graph data. Specifically, inspired by the success of contrastive learning, we propose multi-view contrastive graph clustering (MCGC) method to learn a consensus graph since the original graph could be noisy or incomplete and is not directly applicable. Our method composes of two key steps: we first filter out the undesirable high-frequency noise while preserving the graph geometric features via graph filtering and obtain a smooth representation of nodes; we then learn a consensus graph regularized by graph contrastive loss. Results on several benchmark datasets show the superiority of our method with respect to state-of-the-art approaches. In particular, our simple approach outperforms existing deep learning-based methods.
In this paper, we propose a one-stage online clustering method called Contrastive Clustering (CC) which explicitly performs the instance- and cluster-level contrastive learning. To be specific, for a given dataset, the positive and negative instance pairs are constructed through data augmentations and then projected into a feature space. Therein, the instance- and cluster-level contrastive learning are respectively conducted in the row and column space by maximizing the similarities of positive pairs while minimizing those of negative ones. Our key observation is that the rows of the feature matrix could be regarded as soft labels of instances, and accordingly the columns could be further regarded as cluster representations. By simultaneously optimizing the instance- and cluster-level contrastive loss, the model jointly learns representations and cluster assignments in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experimental results show that CC remarkably outperforms 17 competitive clustering methods on six challenging image benchmarks. In particular, CC achieves an NMI of 0.705 (0.431) on the CIFAR-10 (CIFAR-100) dataset, which is an up to 19\% (39\%) performance improvement compared with the best baseline.
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.
How can we estimate the importance of nodes in a knowledge graph (KG)? A KG is a multi-relational graph that has proven valuable for many tasks including question answering and semantic search. In this paper, we present GENI, a method for tackling the problem of estimating node importance in KGs, which enables several downstream applications such as item recommendation and resource allocation. While a number of approaches have been developed to address this problem for general graphs, they do not fully utilize information available in KGs, or lack flexibility needed to model complex relationship between entities and their importance. To address these limitations, we explore supervised machine learning algorithms. In particular, building upon recent advancement of graph neural networks (GNNs), we develop GENI, a GNN-based method designed to deal with distinctive challenges involved with predicting node importance in KGs. Our method performs an aggregation of importance scores instead of aggregating node embeddings via predicate-aware attention mechanism and flexible centrality adjustment. In our evaluation of GENI and existing methods on predicting node importance in real-world KGs with different characteristics, GENI achieves 5-17% higher NDCG@100 than the state of the art.
In this paper, we present an accurate and scalable approach to the face clustering task. We aim at grouping a set of faces by their potential identities. We formulate this task as a link prediction problem: a link exists between two faces if they are of the same identity. The key idea is that we find the local context in the feature space around an instance (face) contains rich information about the linkage relationship between this instance and its neighbors. By constructing sub-graphs around each instance as input data, which depict the local context, we utilize the graph convolution network (GCN) to perform reasoning and infer the likelihood of linkage between pairs in the sub-graphs. Experiments show that our method is more robust to the complex distribution of faces than conventional methods, yielding favorably comparable results to state-of-the-art methods on standard face clustering benchmarks, and is scalable to large datasets. Furthermore, we show that the proposed method does not need the number of clusters as prior, is aware of noises and outliers, and can be extended to a multi-view version for more accurate clustering accuracy.