Since graph neural networks (GNNs) are often vulnerable to attack, we need to know when we can trust them. We develop a computationally effective approach towards providing robust certificates for message-passing neural networks (MPNNs) using a Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation function. Because our work builds on mixed-integer optimization, it encodes a wide variety of subproblems, for example it admits (i) both adding and removing edges, (ii) both global and local budgets, and (iii) both topological perturbations and feature modifications. Our key technology, topology-based bounds tightening, uses graph structure to tighten bounds. We also experiment with aggressive bounds tightening to dynamically change the optimization constraints by tightening variable bounds. To demonstrate the effectiveness of these strategies, we implement an extension to the open-source branch-and-cut solver SCIP. We test on both node and graph classification problems and consider topological attacks that both add and remove edges.
Morphological neural networks, or layers, can be a powerful tool to boost the progress in mathematical morphology, either on theoretical aspects such as the representation of complete lattice operators, or in the development of image processing pipelines. However, these architectures turn out to be difficult to train when they count more than a few morphological layers, at least within popular machine learning frameworks which use gradient descent based optimization algorithms. In this paper we investigate the potential and limitations of differentiation based approaches and back-propagation applied to morphological networks, in light of the non-smooth optimization concept of Bouligand derivative. We provide insights and first theoretical guidelines, in particular regarding initialization and learning rates.
Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs) have attracted attention recently as an alternative to multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) for scientific machine learning. However, KANs can be expensive to train, even for relatively small networks. Inspired by finite basis physics-informed neural networks (FBPINNs), in this work, we develop a domain decomposition method for KANs that allows for several small KANs to be trained in parallel to give accurate solutions for multiscale problems. We show that finite basis KANs (FBKANs) can provide accurate results with noisy data and for physics-informed training.
Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) employs weak supervision, such as image-level labels, to train the segmentation model. Despite the impressive achievement in recent WSSS methods, we identify that introducing weak labels with high mean Intersection of Union (mIoU) does not guarantee high segmentation performance. Existing studies have emphasized the importance of prioritizing precision and reducing noise to improve overall performance. In the same vein, we propose ORANDNet, an advanced ensemble approach tailored for WSSS. ORANDNet combines Class Activation Maps (CAMs) from two different classifiers to increase the precision of pseudo-masks (PMs). To further mitigate small noise in the PMs, we incorporate curriculum learning. This involves training the segmentation model initially with pairs of smaller-sized images and corresponding PMs, gradually transitioning to the original-sized pairs. By combining the original CAMs of ResNet-50 and ViT, we significantly improve the segmentation performance over the single-best model and the naive ensemble model, respectively. We further extend our ensemble method to CAMs from AMN (ResNet-like) and MCTformer (ViT-like) models, achieving performance benefits in advanced WSSS models. It highlights the potential of our ORANDNet as a final add-on module for WSSS models.
It is well-known that randomly initialized, push-forward, fully-connected neural networks weakly converge to isotropic Gaussian processes, in the limit where the width of all layers goes to infinity. In this paper, we propose to use the angular power spectrum of the limiting field to characterize the complexity of the network architecture. In particular, we define sequences of random variables associated with the angular power spectrum, and provide a full characterization of the network complexity in terms of the asymptotic distribution of these sequences as the depth diverges. On this basis, we classify neural networks as low-disorder, sparse, or high-disorder; we show how this classification highlights a number of distinct features for standard activation functions, and in particular, sparsity properties of ReLU networks. Our theoretical results are also validated by numerical simulations.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have exhibited remarkable performance across various tasks, yet their susceptibility to spurious correlations poses a significant challenge for out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. Spurious correlations refer to erroneous associations in data that do not reflect true underlying relationships but are instead artifacts of dataset characteristics or biases. These correlations can lead DNNs to learn patterns that are not robust across diverse datasets or real-world scenarios, hampering their ability to generalize beyond training data. In this paper, we propose an autoencoder-based approach to analyze the nature of spurious correlations that exist in the Global Wheat Head Detection (GWHD) 2021 dataset. We then use inpainting followed by Weighted Boxes Fusion (WBF) to achieve a 2% increase in the Average Domain Accuracy (ADA) over the YOLOv5 baseline and consistently show that our approach has the ability to suppress some of the spurious correlations in the GWHD 2021 dataset. The key advantage of our approach is that it is more suitable in scenarios where there is limited scope to adapt or fine-tune the trained model in unseen test environments.
Neural collapse describes the geometry of activation in the final layer of a deep neural network when it is trained beyond performance plateaus. Open questions include whether neural collapse leads to better generalization and, if so, why and how training beyond the plateau helps. We model neural collapse as an information bottleneck (IB) problem in order to investigate whether such a compact representation exists and discover its connection to generalization. We demonstrate that neural collapse leads to good generalization specifically when it approaches an optimal IB solution of the classification problem. Recent research has shown that two deep neural networks independently trained with the same contrastive loss objective are linearly identifiable, meaning that the resulting representations are equivalent up to a matrix transformation. We leverage linear identifiability to approximate an analytical solution of the IB problem. This approximation demonstrates that when class means exhibit $K$-simplex Equiangular Tight Frame (ETF) behavior (e.g., $K$=10 for CIFAR10 and $K$=100 for CIFAR100), they coincide with the critical phase transitions of the corresponding IB problem. The performance plateau occurs once the optimal solution for the IB problem includes all of these phase transitions. We also show that the resulting $K$-simplex ETF can be packed into a $K$-dimensional Gaussian distribution using supervised contrastive learning with a ResNet50 backbone. This geometry suggests that the $K$-simplex ETF learned by supervised contrastive learning approximates the optimal features for source coding. Hence, there is a direct correspondence between optimal IB solutions and generalization in contrastive learning.
In large-scale systems there are fundamental challenges when centralised techniques are used for task allocation. The number of interactions is limited by resource constraints such as on computation, storage, and network communication. We can increase scalability by implementing the system as a distributed task-allocation system, sharing tasks across many agents. However, this also increases the resource cost of communications and synchronisation, and is difficult to scale. In this paper we present four algorithms to solve these problems. The combination of these algorithms enable each agent to improve their task allocation strategy through reinforcement learning, while changing how much they explore the system in response to how optimal they believe their current strategy is, given their past experience. We focus on distributed agent systems where the agents' behaviours are constrained by resource usage limits, limiting agents to local rather than system-wide knowledge. We evaluate these algorithms in a simulated environment where agents are given a task composed of multiple subtasks that must be allocated to other agents with differing capabilities, to then carry out those tasks. We also simulate real-life system effects such as networking instability. Our solution is shown to solve the task allocation problem to 6.7% of the theoretical optimal within the system configurations considered. It provides 5x better performance recovery over no-knowledge retention approaches when system connectivity is impacted, and is tested against systems up to 100 agents with less than a 9% impact on the algorithms' performance.
We hypothesize that due to the greedy nature of learning in multi-modal deep neural networks, these models tend to rely on just one modality while under-fitting the other modalities. Such behavior is counter-intuitive and hurts the models' generalization, as we observe empirically. To estimate the model's dependence on each modality, we compute the gain on the accuracy when the model has access to it in addition to another modality. We refer to this gain as the conditional utilization rate. In the experiments, we consistently observe an imbalance in conditional utilization rates between modalities, across multiple tasks and architectures. Since conditional utilization rate cannot be computed efficiently during training, we introduce a proxy for it based on the pace at which the model learns from each modality, which we refer to as the conditional learning speed. We propose an algorithm to balance the conditional learning speeds between modalities during training and demonstrate that it indeed addresses the issue of greedy learning. The proposed algorithm improves the model's generalization on three datasets: Colored MNIST, Princeton ModelNet40, and NVIDIA Dynamic Hand Gesture.
Graph representation learning for hypergraphs can be used to extract patterns among higher-order interactions that are critically important in many real world problems. Current approaches designed for hypergraphs, however, are unable to handle different types of hypergraphs and are typically not generic for various learning tasks. Indeed, models that can predict variable-sized heterogeneous hyperedges have not been available. Here we develop a new self-attention based graph neural network called Hyper-SAGNN applicable to homogeneous and heterogeneous hypergraphs with variable hyperedge sizes. We perform extensive evaluations on multiple datasets, including four benchmark network datasets and two single-cell Hi-C datasets in genomics. We demonstrate that Hyper-SAGNN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on traditional tasks while also achieving great performance on a new task called outsider identification. Hyper-SAGNN will be useful for graph representation learning to uncover complex higher-order interactions in different applications.
Recent advances in 3D fully convolutional networks (FCN) have made it feasible to produce dense voxel-wise predictions of volumetric images. In this work, we show that a multi-class 3D FCN trained on manually labeled CT scans of several anatomical structures (ranging from the large organs to thin vessels) can achieve competitive segmentation results, while avoiding the need for handcrafting features or training class-specific models. To this end, we propose a two-stage, coarse-to-fine approach that will first use a 3D FCN to roughly define a candidate region, which will then be used as input to a second 3D FCN. This reduces the number of voxels the second FCN has to classify to ~10% and allows it to focus on more detailed segmentation of the organs and vessels. We utilize training and validation sets consisting of 331 clinical CT images and test our models on a completely unseen data collection acquired at a different hospital that includes 150 CT scans, targeting three anatomical organs (liver, spleen, and pancreas). In challenging organs such as the pancreas, our cascaded approach improves the mean Dice score from 68.5 to 82.2%, achieving the highest reported average score on this dataset. We compare with a 2D FCN method on a separate dataset of 240 CT scans with 18 classes and achieve a significantly higher performance in small organs and vessels. Furthermore, we explore fine-tuning our models to different datasets. Our experiments illustrate the promise and robustness of current 3D FCN based semantic segmentation of medical images, achieving state-of-the-art results. Our code and trained models are available for download: //github.com/holgerroth/3Dunet_abdomen_cascade.