Port-Hamiltonian neural networks (pHNNs) are emerging as a powerful modeling tool that integrates physical laws with deep learning techniques. While most research has focused on modeling the entire dynamics of interconnected systems, the potential for identifying and modeling individual subsystems while operating as part of a larger system has been overlooked. This study addresses this gap by introducing a novel method for using pHNNs to identify such subsystems based solely on input-output measurements. By utilizing the inherent compositional property of the port-Hamiltonian systems, we developed an algorithm that learns the dynamics of individual subsystems, without requiring direct access to their internal states. On top of that, by choosing an output error (OE) model structure, we have been able to handle measurement noise effectively. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated through tests on interconnected systems, including multi-physics scenarios, demonstrating its potential for identifying subsystem dynamics and facilitating their integration into new interconnected models.
Time-evolving graphs arise frequently when modeling complex dynamical systems such as social networks, traffic flow, and biological processes. Developing techniques to identify and analyze communities in these time-varying graph structures is an important challenge. In this work, we generalize existing spectral clustering algorithms from static to dynamic graphs using canonical correlation analysis (CCA) to capture the temporal evolution of clusters. Based on this extended canonical correlation framework, we define the spatio-temporal graph Laplacian and investigate its spectral properties. We connect these concepts to dynamical systems theory via transfer operators, and illustrate the advantages of our method on benchmark graphs by comparison with existing methods. We show that the spatio-temporal graph Laplacian allows for a clear interpretation of cluster structure evolution over time for directed and undirected graphs.
Vector-quantized networks (VQNs) have exhibited remarkable performance across various tasks, yet they are prone to training instability, which complicates the training process due to the necessity for techniques such as subtle initialization and model distillation. In this study, we identify the local minima issue as the primary cause of this instability. To address this, we integrate an optimal transport method in place of the nearest neighbor search to achieve a more globally informed assignment. We introduce OptVQ, a novel vector quantization method that employs the Sinkhorn algorithm to optimize the optimal transport problem, thereby enhancing the stability and efficiency of the training process. To mitigate the influence of diverse data distributions on the Sinkhorn algorithm, we implement a straightforward yet effective normalization strategy. Our comprehensive experiments on image reconstruction tasks demonstrate that OptVQ achieves 100% codebook utilization and surpasses current state-of-the-art VQNs in reconstruction quality.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed in real-world applications, driving the need to evaluate the trustworthiness of their generated text. To this end, reliable uncertainty estimation is essential. Since current LLMs generate text autoregressively through a stochastic process, the same prompt can lead to varying outputs. Consequently, leading uncertainty estimation methods generate and analyze multiple output sequences to determine the LLM's uncertainty. However, generating output sequences is computationally expensive, making these methods impractical at scale. In this work, we inspect the theoretical foundations of the leading methods and explore new directions to enhance their computational efficiency. Building on the framework of proper scoring rules, we find that the negative log-likelihood of the most likely output sequence constitutes a theoretically grounded uncertainty measure. To approximate this alternative measure, we propose G-NLL, which has the advantage of being obtained using only a single output sequence generated by greedy decoding. This makes uncertainty estimation more efficient and straightforward, while preserving theoretical rigor. Empirical results demonstrate that G-NLL achieves state-of-the-art performance across various LLMs and tasks. Our work lays the foundation for efficient and reliable uncertainty estimation in natural language generation, challenging the necessity of more computationally involved methods currently leading the field.
Electromagnetic information theory (EIT) is an emerging interdisciplinary subject that integrates classical Maxwell electromagnetics and Shannon information theory. The goal of EIT is to uncover the information transmission mechanisms from an electromagnetic (EM) perspective in wireless systems. Existing works on EIT are mainly focused on the analysis of EM channel characteristics, degrees-of-freedom, and system capacity. However, these works do not clarify how to integrate EIT knowledge into the design and optimization of wireless systems. To fill in this gap, in this paper, we propose an EIT-based statistical channel model with simplified parameterization. Thanks to the simplified closed-form expression of the EMCF, it can be readily applied to various channel modeling and inference tasks. Specifically, by averaging the solutions of Maxwell's equations over a tunable von Mises distribution, we obtain a spatio-temporal correlation function (STCF) model of the EM channel, which we name as the EMCF. Furthermore, by tuning the parameters of the EMCF, we propose an EIT-based covariance estimator (EIT-Cov) to accurately capture the channel covariance. Since classical MMSE estimators can exploit prior information contained in the channel covariance matrix, we further propose the EIT-MMSE channel estimator by substituting EMCF for the covariance matrix. Simulation results show that both the proposed EIT-Cov covariance estimator and the EIT-MMSE channel estimator outperform their baseline algorithms, thus proving that EIT is beneficial to wireless communication systems.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial examples (AEs) that mislead the model while appearing benign to human observers. A critical concern is the transferability of AEs, which enables black-box attacks without direct access to the target model. However, many previous attacks have failed to explain the intrinsic mechanism of adversarial transferability. In this paper, we rethink the property of transferable AEs and reformalize the formulation of transferability. Building on insights from this mechanism, we analyze the generalization of AEs across models with different architectures and prove that we can find a local perturbation to mitigate the gap between surrogate and target models. We further establish the inner connections between model smoothness and flat local maxima, both of which contribute to the transferability of AEs. Further, we propose a new adversarial attack algorithm, \textbf{A}dversarial \textbf{W}eight \textbf{T}uning (AWT), which adaptively adjusts the parameters of the surrogate model using generated AEs to optimize the flat local maxima and model smoothness simultaneously, without the need for extra data. AWT is a data-free tuning method that combines gradient-based and model-based attack methods to enhance the transferability of AEs. Extensive experiments on a variety of models with different architectures on ImageNet demonstrate that AWT yields superior performance over other attacks, with an average increase of nearly 5\% and 10\% attack success rates on CNN-based and Transformer-based models, respectively, compared to state-of-the-art attacks.
Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used for document classification. However, most existing methods are based on static word co-occurrence graphs without sentence-level information, which poses three challenges:(1) word ambiguity, (2) word synonymity, and (3) dynamic contextual dependency. To address these challenges, we propose a novel GNN-based sparse structure learning model for inductive document classification. Specifically, a document-level graph is initially generated by a disjoint union of sentence-level word co-occurrence graphs. Our model collects a set of trainable edges connecting disjoint words between sentences and employs structure learning to sparsely select edges with dynamic contextual dependencies. Graphs with sparse structures can jointly exploit local and global contextual information in documents through GNNs. For inductive learning, the refined document graph is further fed into a general readout function for graph-level classification and optimization in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms most state-of-the-art results, and reveal the necessity to learn sparse structures for each document.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for embedding-based entity alignment due to their capability of identifying isomorphic subgraphs. However, in real knowledge graphs (KGs), the counterpart entities usually have non-isomorphic neighborhood structures, which easily causes GNNs to yield different representations for them. To tackle this problem, we propose a new KG alignment network, namely AliNet, aiming at mitigating the non-isomorphism of neighborhood structures in an end-to-end manner. As the direct neighbors of counterpart entities are usually dissimilar due to the schema heterogeneity, AliNet introduces distant neighbors to expand the overlap between their neighborhood structures. It employs an attention mechanism to highlight helpful distant neighbors and reduce noises. Then, it controls the aggregation of both direct and distant neighborhood information using a gating mechanism. We further propose a relation loss to refine entity representations. We perform thorough experiments with detailed ablation studies and analyses on five entity alignment datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of AliNet.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have revolutionized the field of graph representation learning through effectively learned node embeddings, and achieved state-of-the-art results in tasks such as node classification and link prediction. However, current GNN methods are inherently flat and do not learn hierarchical representations of graphs---a limitation that is especially problematic for the task of graph classification, where the goal is to predict the label associated with an entire graph. Here we propose DiffPool, a differentiable graph pooling module that can generate hierarchical representations of graphs and can be combined with various graph neural network architectures in an end-to-end fashion. DiffPool learns a differentiable soft cluster assignment for nodes at each layer of a deep GNN, mapping nodes to a set of clusters, which then form the coarsened input for the next GNN layer. Our experimental results show that combining existing GNN methods with DiffPool yields an average improvement of 5-10% accuracy on graph classification benchmarks, compared to all existing pooling approaches, achieving a new state-of-the-art on four out of five benchmark data sets.
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.