arXiv subjects

James Cheng

Publications and source records attributed to James Cheng.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Calibrating and Improving Graph Contrastive Learning

Graph contrastive learning algorithms have demonstrated remarkable success in various applications such as node classification, link prediction, and graph clustering. However, in unsupervised graph contrastive learning, some contrastive pairs may contradict the truths in downstream tasks and thus the decrease of losses on these pairs undesirably harms the performance in the downstream tasks. To assess the discrepancy between the prediction and the ground-truth in the downstream tasks for these contrastive pairs, we adapt the expected calibration error (ECE) to graph contrastive learning. The analysis of ECE motivates us to propose a novel regularization method, Contrast-Reg, to ensure that decreasing the contrastive loss leads to better performance in the downstream tasks. As a plug-in regularizer, Contrast-Reg effectively improves the performance of existing graph contrastive learning algorithms. We provide both theoretical and empirical results to demonstrate the effectiveness of Contrast-Reg in enhancing the generalizability of the Graph Neural Network(GNN) model and improving the performance of graph contrastive algorithms with different similarity definitions and encoder backbones across various downstream tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Pareto Invariant Risk Minimization: Towards Mitigating the Optimization Dilemma in Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Recently, there has been a growing surge of interest in enabling machine learning systems to generalize well to Out-of-Distribution (OOD) data. Most efforts are devoted to advancing optimization objectives that regularize models to capture the underlying invariance; however, there often are compromises in the optimization process of these OOD objectives: i) Many OOD objectives have to be relaxed as penalty terms of Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) for the ease of optimization, while the relaxed forms can weaken the robustness of the original objective; ii) The penalty terms also require careful tuning of the penalty weights due to the intrinsic conflicts between ERM and OOD objectives. Consequently, these compromises could easily lead to suboptimal performance of either the ERM or OOD objective. To address these issues, we introduce a multi-objective optimization (MOO) perspective to understand the OOD optimization process, and propose a new optimization scheme called PAreto Invariant Risk Minimization (PAIR). PAIR improves the robustness of OOD objectives by cooperatively optimizing with other OOD objectives, thereby bridging the gaps caused by the relaxations. Then PAIR approaches a Pareto optimal solution that trades off the ERM and OOD objectives properly. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks, WILDS, show that PAIR alleviates the compromises and yields top OOD performances.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

DGI: Easy and Efficient Inference for GNNs

While many systems have been developed to train Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), efficient model inference and evaluation remain to be addressed. For instance, using the widely adopted node-wise approach, model evaluation can account for up to 94% of the time in the end-to-end training process due to neighbor explosion, which means that a node accesses its multi-hop neighbors. On the other hand, layer-wise inference avoids the neighbor explosion problem by conducting inference layer by layer such that the nodes only need their one-hop neighbors in each layer. However, implementing layer-wise inference requires substantial engineering efforts because users need to manually decompose a GNN model into layers for computation and split workload into batches to fit into device memory. In this paper, we develop Deep Graph Inference (DGI) -- a system for easy and efficient GNN model inference, which automatically translates the training code of a GNN model for layer-wise execution. DGI is general for various GNN models and different kinds of inference requests, and supports out-of-core execution on large graphs that cannot fit in CPU memory. Experimental results show that DGI consistently outperforms layer-wise inference across different datasets and hardware settings, and the speedup can be over 1,000x.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Learning Causally Invariant Representations for Out-of-Distribution Generalization on Graphs

Despite recent success in using the invariance principle for out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization on Euclidean data (e.g., images), studies on graph data are still limited. Different from images, the complex nature of graphs poses unique challenges to adopting the invariance principle. In particular, distribution shifts on graphs can appear in a variety of forms such as attributes and structures, making it difficult to identify the invariance. Moreover, domain or environment partitions, which are often required by OOD methods on Euclidean data, could be highly expensive to obtain for graphs. To bridge this gap, we propose a new framework, called Causality Inspired Invariant Graph LeArning (CIGA), to capture the invariance of graphs for guaranteed OOD generalization under various distribution shifts. Specifically, we characterize potential distribution shifts on graphs with causal models, concluding that OOD generalization on graphs is achievable when models focus only on subgraphs containing the most information about the causes of labels. Accordingly, we propose an information-theoretic objective to extract the desired subgraphs that maximally preserve the invariant intra-class information. Learning with these subgraphs is immune to distribution shifts. Extensive experiments on 16 synthetic or real-world datasets, including a challenging setting -- DrugOOD, from AI-aided drug discovery, validate the superior OOD performance of CIGA.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Measuring and Improving the Use of Graph Information in Graph Neural Networks

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used for representation learning on graph data. However, there is limited understanding on how much performance GNNs actually gain from graph data. This paper introduces a context-surrounding GNN framework and proposes two smoothness metrics to measure the quantity and quality of information obtained from graph data. A new GNN model, called CS-GNN, is then designed to improve the use of graph information based on the smoothness values of a graph. CS-GNN is shown to achieve better performance than existing methods in different types of real graphs.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

A Representation Learning Framework for Property Graphs

Representation learning on graphs, also called graph embedding, has demonstrated its significant impact on a series of machine learning applications such as classification, prediction and recommendation. However, existing work has largely ignored the rich information contained in the properties (or attributes) of both nodes and edges of graphs in modern applications, e.g., those represented by property graphs. To date, most existing graph embedding methods either focus on plain graphs with only the graph topology, or consider properties on nodes only. We propose PGE, a graph representation learning framework that incorporates both node and edge properties into the graph embedding procedure. PGE uses node clustering to assign biases to differentiate neighbors of a node and leverages multiple data-driven matrices to aggregate the property information of neighbors sampled based on a biased strategy. PGE adopts the popular inductive model for neighborhood aggregation. We provide detailed analyses on the efficacy of our method and validate the performance of PGE by showing how PGE achieves better embedding results than the state-of-the-art graph embedding methods on benchmark applications such as node classification and link prediction over real-world datasets.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Fast and Reliable Evaluation of Adversarial Robustness with Minimum-Margin Attack

The AutoAttack (AA) has been the most reliable method to evaluate adversarial robustness when considerable computational resources are available. However, the high computational cost (e.g., 100 times more than that of the project gradient descent attack) makes AA infeasible for practitioners with limited computational resources, and also hinders applications of AA in the adversarial training (AT). In this paper, we propose a novel method, minimum-margin (MM) attack, to fast and reliably evaluate adversarial robustness. Compared with AA, our method achieves comparable performance but only costs 3% of the computational time in extensive experiments. The reliability of our method lies in that we evaluate the quality of adversarial examples using the margin between two targets that can precisely identify the most adversarial example. The computational efficiency of our method lies in an effective Sequential TArget Ranking Selection (STARS) method, ensuring that the cost of the MM attack is independent of the number of classes. The MM attack opens a new way for evaluating adversarial robustness and provides a feasible and reliable way to generate high-quality adversarial examples in AT.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Understanding and Improving Graph Injection Attack by Promoting Unnoticeability

Recently Graph Injection Attack (GIA) emerges as a practical attack scenario on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), where the adversary can merely inject few malicious nodes instead of modifying existing nodes or edges, i.e., Graph Modification Attack (GMA). Although GIA has achieved promising results, little is known about why it is successful and whether there is any pitfall behind the success. To understand the power of GIA, we compare it with GMA and find that GIA can be provably more harmful than GMA due to its relatively high flexibility. However, the high flexibility will also lead to great damage to the homophily distribution of the original graph, i.e., similarity among neighbors. Consequently, the threats of GIA can be easily alleviated or even prevented by homophily-based defenses designed to recover the original homophily. To mitigate the issue, we introduce a novel constraint -- homophily unnoticeability that enforces GIA to preserve the homophily, and propose Harmonious Adversarial Objective (HAO) to instantiate it. Extensive experiments verify that GIA with HAO can break homophily-based defenses and outperform previous GIA attacks by a significant margin. We believe our methods can serve for a more reliable evaluation of the robustness of GNNs.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Practical Schemes for Finding Near-Stationary Points of Convex Finite-Sums

In convex optimization, the problem of finding near-stationary points has not been adequately studied yet, unlike other optimality measures such as the function value. Even in the deterministic case, the optimal method (OGM-G, due to Kim and Fessler (2021)) has just been discovered recently. In this work, we conduct a systematic study of algorithmic techniques for finding near-stationary points of convex finite-sums. Our main contributions are several algorithmic discoveries: (1) we discover a memory-saving variant of OGM-G based on the performance estimation problem approach (Drori and Teboulle, 2014); (2) we design a new accelerated SVRG variant that can simultaneously achieve fast rates for minimizing both the gradient norm and function value; (3) we propose an adaptively regularized accelerated SVRG variant, which does not require the knowledge of some unknown initial constants and achieves near-optimal complexities. We put an emphasis on the simplicity and practicality of the new schemes, which could facilitate future work.

math.OC↗

arXiv2021

Accelerating Perturbed Stochastic Iterates in Asynchronous Lock-Free Optimization

We show that stochastic acceleration can be achieved under the perturbed iterate framework (Mania et al., 2017) in asynchronous lock-free optimization, which leads to the optimal incremental gradient complexity for finite-sum objectives. We prove that our new accelerated method requires the same linear speed-up condition as the existing non-accelerated methods. Our core algorithmic discovery is a new accelerated SVRG variant with sparse updates. Empirical results are presented to verify our theoretical findings.

math.OC↗

arXiv2021

Local Reweighting for Adversarial Training

Instances-reweighted adversarial training (IRAT) can significantly boost the robustness of trained models, where data being less/more vulnerable to the given attack are assigned smaller/larger weights during training. However, when tested on attacks different from the given attack simulated in training, the robustness may drop significantly (e.g., even worse than no reweighting). In this paper, we study this problem and propose our solution--locally reweighted adversarial training (LRAT). The rationale behind IRAT is that we do not need to pay much attention to an instance that is already safe under the attack. We argue that the safeness should be attack-dependent, so that for the same instance, its weight can change given different attacks based on the same model. Thus, if the attack simulated in training is mis-specified, the weights of IRAT are misleading. To this end, LRAT pairs each instance with its adversarial variants and performs local reweighting inside each pair, while performing no global reweighting--the rationale is to fit the instance itself if it is immune to the attack, but not to skip the pair, in order to passively defend different attacks in future. Experiments show that LRAT works better than both IRAT (i.e., global reweighting) and the standard AT (i.e., no reweighting) when trained with an attack and tested on different attacks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

G-Tran: Making Distributed Graph Transactions Fast

Graph transaction processing raises many unique challenges such as random data access due to the irregularity of graph structures, low throughput and high abort rate due to the relatively large read/write sets in graph transactions. To address these challenges, we present G-Tran -- an RDMA-enabled distributed in-memory graph database with serializable and snapshot isolation support. First, we propose a graph-native data store to achieve good data locality and fast data access for transactional updates and queries. Second, G-Tran adopts a fully decentralized architecture that leverages RDMA to process distributed transactions with the MPP model, which can achieve high performance by utilizing all computing resources. In addition, we propose a new MV-OCC implementation with two optimizations to address the issue of large read/write sets in graph transactions. Extensive experiments show that G-Tran achieves competitive performance compared with other popular graph databases on benchmark workloads.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2021

Self-Enhanced GNN: Improving Graph Neural Networks Using Model Outputs

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have received much attention recently because of their excellent performance on graph-based tasks. However, existing research on GNNs focuses on designing more effective models without considering much about the quality of the input data. In this paper, we propose self-enhanced GNN (SEG), which improves the quality of the input data using the outputs of existing GNN models for better performance on semi-supervised node classification. As graph data consist of both topology and node labels, we improve input data quality from both perspectives. For topology, we observe that higher classification accuracy can be achieved when the ratio of inter-class edges (connecting nodes from different classes) is low and propose topology update to remove inter-class edges and add intra-class edges. For node labels, we propose training node augmentation, which enlarges the training set using the labels predicted by existing GNN models. SEG is a general framework that can be easily combined with existing GNN models. Experimental results validate that SEG consistently improves the performance of well-known GNN models such as GCN, GAT and SGC across different datasets.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Rethinking Graph Regularization for Graph Neural Networks

The graph Laplacian regularization term is usually used in semi-supervised representation learning to provide graph structure information for a model $f(X)$. However, with the recent popularity of graph neural networks (GNNs), directly encoding graph structure $A$ into a model, i.e., $f(A, X)$, has become the more common approach. While we show that graph Laplacian regularization brings little-to-no benefit to existing GNNs, and propose a simple but non-trivial variant of graph Laplacian regularization, called Propagation-regularization (P-reg), to boost the performance of existing GNN models. We provide formal analyses to show that P-reg not only infuses extra information (that is not captured by the traditional graph Laplacian regularization) into GNNs, but also has the capacity equivalent to an infinite-depth graph convolutional network. We demonstrate that P-reg can effectively boost the performance of existing GNN models on both node-level and graph-level tasks across many different datasets.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

The item selection problem for user cold-start recommendation

When a new user just signs up on a website, we usually have no information about him/her, i.e. no interaction with items, no user profile and no social links with other users. Under such circumstances, we still expect our recommender systems could attract the users at the first time so that the users decide to stay on the website and become active users. This problem falls into new user cold-start category and it is crucial to the development and even survival of a company. Existing works on user cold-start recommendation either require additional user efforts, e.g. setting up an interview process, or make use of side information [10] such as user demographics, locations, social relations, etc. However, users may not be willing to take the interview and side information on cold-start users is usually not available. Therefore, we consider a pure cold-start scenario where neither interaction nor side information is available and no user effort is required. Studying this setting is also important for the initialization of other cold-start solutions, such as initializing the first few questions of an interview.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2020

Boosting First-Order Methods by Shifting Objective: New Schemes with Faster Worst-Case Rates

We propose a new methodology to design first-order methods for unconstrained strongly convex problems. Specifically, instead of tackling the original objective directly, we construct a shifted objective function that has the same minimizer as the original objective and encodes both the smoothness and strong convexity of the original objective in an interpolation condition. We then propose an algorithmic template for tackling the shifted objective, which can exploit such a condition. Following this template, we derive several new accelerated schemes for problems that are equipped with various first-order oracles and show that the interpolation condition allows us to vastly simplify and tighten the analysis of the derived methods. In particular, all the derived methods have faster worst-case convergence rates than their existing counterparts. Experiments on machine learning tasks are conducted to evaluate the new methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Hierarchical Graph Matching Network for Graph Similarity Computation

Graph edit distance / similarity is widely used in many tasks, such as graph similarity search, binary function analysis, and graph clustering. However, computing the exact graph edit distance (GED) or maximum common subgraph (MCS) between two graphs is known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we propose the hierarchical graph matching network (HGMN), which learns to compute graph similarity from data. HGMN is motivated by the observation that two similar graphs should also be similar when they are compressed into more compact graphs. HGMN utilizes multiple stages of hierarchical clustering to organize a graph into successively more compact graphs. At each stage, the earth mover distance (EMD) is adopted to obtain a one-to-one mapping between the nodes in two graphs (on which graph similarity is to be computed), and a correlation matrix is also derived from the embeddings of the nodes in the two graphs. The correlation matrices from all stages are used as input for a convolutional neural network (CNN), which is trained to predict graph similarity by minimizing the mean squared error (MSE). Experimental evaluation on 4 datasets in different domains and 4 performance metrics shows that HGMN consistently outperforms existing baselines in the accuracy of graph similarity approximation.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2020

Understanding Graph Neural Networks from Graph Signal Denoising Perspectives

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have attracted much attention because of their excellent performance on tasks such as node classification. However, there is inadequate understanding on how and why GNNs work, especially for node representation learning. This paper aims to provide a theoretical framework to understand GNNs, specifically, spectral graph convolutional networks and graph attention networks, from graph signal denoising perspectives. Our framework shows that GNNs are implicitly solving graph signal denoising problems: spectral graph convolutions work as denoising node features, while graph attentions work as denoising edge weights. We also show that a linear self-attention mechanism is able to compete with the state-of-the-art graph attention methods. Our theoretical results further lead to two new models, GSDN-F and GSDN-EF, which work effectively for graphs with noisy node features and/or noisy edges. We validate our theoretical findings and also the effectiveness of our new models by experiments on benchmark datasets. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/fuguoji/GSDN}.

cs.LG↗