For deep ordinal classification, learning a well-structured feature space specific to ordinal classification is helpful to properly capture the ordinal nature among classes. Intuitively, when Euclidean distance metric is used, an ideal ordinal layout in feature space would be that the sample clusters are arranged in class order along a straight line in space. However, enforcing samples to conform to a specific layout in the feature space is a challenging problem. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel Constrained Proxies Learning (CPL) method, which can learn a proxy for each ordinal class and then adjusts the global layout of classes by constraining these proxies. Specifically, we propose two kinds of strategies: hard layout constraint and soft layout constraint. The hard layout constraint is realized by directly controlling the generation of proxies to force them to be placed in a strict linear layout or semicircular layout (i.e., two instantiations of strict ordinal layout). The soft layout constraint is realized by constraining that the proxy layout should always produce unimodal proxy-to-proxies similarity distribution for each proxy (i.e., to be a relaxed ordinal layout). Experiments show that the proposed CPL method outperforms previous deep ordinal classification methods under the same setting of feature extractor.
Graph classification aims to categorise graphs based on their structure and node attributes. In this work, we propose to tackle this task using tools from graph signal processing by deriving spectral features, which we then use to design two variants of Gaussian process models for graph classification. The first variant uses spectral features based on the distribution of energy of a node feature signal over the spectrum of the graph. We show that even such a simple approach, having no learned parameters, can yield competitive performance compared to strong neural network and graph kernel baselines. A second, more sophisticated variant is designed to capture multi-scale and localised patterns in the graph by learning spectral graph wavelet filters, obtaining improved performance on synthetic and real-world data sets. Finally, we show that both models produce well calibrated uncertainty estimates, enabling reliable decision making based on the model predictions.
When deploying machine learning solutions, they must satisfy multiple requirements beyond accuracy, such as fairness, robustness, or safety. These requirements are imposed during training either implicitly, using penalties, or explicitly, using constrained optimization methods based on Lagrangian duality. Either way, specifying requirements is hindered by the presence of compromises and limited prior knowledge about the data. Furthermore, their impact on performance can often only be evaluated by actually solving the learning problem. This paper presents a constrained learning approach that adapts the requirements while simultaneously solving the learning task. To do so, it relaxes the learning constraints in a way that contemplates how much they affect the task at hand by balancing the performance gains obtained from the relaxation against a user-defined cost of that relaxation. We call this approach resilient constrained learning after the term used to describe ecological systems that adapt to disruptions by modifying their operation. We show conditions under which this balance can be achieved and introduce a practical algorithm to compute it, for which we derive approximation and generalization guarantees. We showcase the advantages of this resilient learning method in image classification tasks involving multiple potential invariances and in heterogeneous federated learning.
Domain adaptive semantic segmentation enables robust pixel-wise understanding in real-world driving scenes. Source-free domain adaptation, as a more practical technique, addresses the concerns of data privacy and storage limitations in typical unsupervised domain adaptation methods. It utilizes a well-trained source model and unlabeled target data to achieve adaptation in the target domain. However, in the absence of source data and target labels, current solutions cannot sufficiently reduce the impact of domain shift and fully leverage the information from the target data. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end source-free domain adaptation semantic segmentation method via Importance-Aware and Prototype-Contrast (IAPC) learning. The proposed IAPC framework effectively extracts domain-invariant knowledge from the well-trained source model and learns domain-specific knowledge from the unlabeled target domain. Specifically, considering the problem of domain shift in the prediction of the target domain by the source model, we put forward an importance-aware mechanism for the biased target prediction probability distribution to extract domain-invariant knowledge from the source model. We further introduce a prototype-contrast strategy, which includes a prototype-symmetric cross-entropy loss and a prototype-enhanced cross-entropy loss, to learn target intra-domain knowledge without relying on labels. A comprehensive variety of experiments on two domain adaptive semantic segmentation benchmarks demonstrates that the proposed end-to-end IAPC solution outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Code will be made publicly available at //github.com/yihong-97/Source-free_IAPC.
The adaptive processing of structured data is a long-standing research topic in machine learning that investigates how to automatically learn a mapping from a structured input to outputs of various nature. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the adaptive processing of graphs, which led to the development of different neural network-based methodologies. In this thesis, we take a different route and develop a Bayesian Deep Learning framework for graph learning. The dissertation begins with a review of the principles over which most of the methods in the field are built, followed by a study on graph classification reproducibility issues. We then proceed to bridge the basic ideas of deep learning for graphs with the Bayesian world, by building our deep architectures in an incremental fashion. This framework allows us to consider graphs with discrete and continuous edge features, producing unsupervised embeddings rich enough to reach the state of the art on several classification tasks. Our approach is also amenable to a Bayesian nonparametric extension that automatizes the choice of almost all model's hyper-parameters. Two real-world applications demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning for graphs. The first concerns the prediction of information-theoretic quantities for molecular simulations with supervised neural models. After that, we exploit our Bayesian models to solve a malware-classification task while being robust to intra-procedural code obfuscation techniques. We conclude the dissertation with an attempt to blend the best of the neural and Bayesian worlds together. The resulting hybrid model is able to predict multimodal distributions conditioned on input graphs, with the consequent ability to model stochasticity and uncertainty better than most works. Overall, we aim to provide a Bayesian perspective into the articulated research field of deep learning for graphs.
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.
Spatio-temporal forecasting is challenging attributing to the high nonlinearity in temporal dynamics as well as complex location-characterized patterns in spatial domains, especially in fields like weather forecasting. Graph convolutions are usually used for modeling the spatial dependency in meteorology to handle the irregular distribution of sensors' spatial location. In this work, a novel graph-based convolution for imitating the meteorological flows is proposed to capture the local spatial patterns. Based on the assumption of smoothness of location-characterized patterns, we propose conditional local convolution whose shared kernel on nodes' local space is approximated by feedforward networks, with local representations of coordinate obtained by horizon maps into cylindrical-tangent space as its input. The established united standard of local coordinate system preserves the orientation on geography. We further propose the distance and orientation scaling terms to reduce the impacts of irregular spatial distribution. The convolution is embedded in a Recurrent Neural Network architecture to model the temporal dynamics, leading to the Conditional Local Convolution Recurrent Network (CLCRN). Our model is evaluated on real-world weather benchmark datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance with obvious improvements. We conduct further analysis on local pattern visualization, model's framework choice, advantages of horizon maps and etc.
Self-supervised learning has been widely used to obtain transferrable representations from unlabeled images. Especially, recent contrastive learning methods have shown impressive performances on downstream image classification tasks. While these contrastive methods mainly focus on generating invariant global representations at the image-level under semantic-preserving transformations, they are prone to overlook spatial consistency of local representations and therefore have a limitation in pretraining for localization tasks such as object detection and instance segmentation. Moreover, aggressively cropped views used in existing contrastive methods can minimize representation distances between the semantically different regions of a single image. In this paper, we propose a spatially consistent representation learning algorithm (SCRL) for multi-object and location-specific tasks. In particular, we devise a novel self-supervised objective that tries to produce coherent spatial representations of a randomly cropped local region according to geometric translations and zooming operations. On various downstream localization tasks with benchmark datasets, the proposed SCRL shows significant performance improvements over the image-level supervised pretraining as well as the state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods.
Time Series Classification (TSC) is an important and challenging problem in data mining. With the increase of time series data availability, hundreds of TSC algorithms have been proposed. Among these methods, only a few have considered Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to perform this task. This is surprising as deep learning has seen very successful applications in the last years. DNNs have indeed revolutionized the field of computer vision especially with the advent of novel deeper architectures such as Residual and Convolutional Neural Networks. Apart from images, sequential data such as text and audio can also be processed with DNNs to reach state-of-the-art performance for document classification and speech recognition. In this article, we study the current state-of-the-art performance of deep learning algorithms for TSC by presenting an empirical study of the most recent DNN architectures for TSC. We give an overview of the most successful deep learning applications in various time series domains under a unified taxonomy of DNNs for TSC. We also provide an open source deep learning framework to the TSC community where we implemented each of the compared approaches and evaluated them on a univariate TSC benchmark (the UCR/UEA archive) and 12 multivariate time series datasets. By training 8,730 deep learning models on 97 time series datasets, we propose the most exhaustive study of DNNs for TSC to date.
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have been successfully applied in node classification tasks of network mining. However, most of these models based on neighborhood aggregation are usually shallow and lack the "graph pooling" mechanism, which prevents the model from obtaining adequate global information. In order to increase the receptive field, we propose a novel deep Hierarchical Graph Convolutional Network (H-GCN) for semi-supervised node classification. H-GCN first repeatedly aggregates structurally similar nodes to hyper-nodes and then refines the coarsened graph to the original to restore the representation for each node. Instead of merely aggregating one- or two-hop neighborhood information, the proposed coarsening procedure enlarges the receptive field for each node, hence more global information can be learned. Comprehensive experiments conducted on public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method over the state-of-art methods. Notably, our model gains substantial improvements when only a few labeled samples are provided.
Text Classification is an important and classical problem in natural language processing. There have been a number of studies that applied convolutional neural networks (convolution on regular grid, e.g., sequence) to classification. However, only a limited number of studies have explored the more flexible graph convolutional neural networks (e.g., convolution on non-grid, e.g., arbitrary graph) for the task. In this work, we propose to use graph convolutional networks for text classification. We build a single text graph for a corpus based on word co-occurrence and document word relations, then learn a Text Graph Convolutional Network (Text GCN) for the corpus. Our Text GCN is initialized with one-hot representation for word and document, it then jointly learns the embeddings for both words and documents, as supervised by the known class labels for documents. Our experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that a vanilla Text GCN without any external word embeddings or knowledge outperforms state-of-the-art methods for text classification. On the other hand, Text GCN also learns predictive word and document embeddings. In addition, experimental results show that the improvement of Text GCN over state-of-the-art comparison methods become more prominent as we lower the percentage of training data, suggesting the robustness of Text GCN to less training data in text classification.