GCNH: A Simple Method For Representation Learning On Heterophilous Graphs

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are well-suited for learning on homophilous graphs, i.e., graphs in which edges tend to connect nodes of the same type. Yet, achievement of consistent GNN performance on heterophilous graphs remains an open research problem. Recent works have proposed extensions to standard GNN architectures to improve performance on heterophilous graphs, trading off model simplicity for prediction accuracy. However, these models fail to capture basic graph properties, such as neighborhood label distribution, which are fundamental for learning. In this work, we propose GCN for Heterophily (GCNH), a simple yet effective GNN architecture applicable to both heterophilous and homophilous scenarios. GCNH learns and combines separate representations for a node and its neighbors, using one learned importance coefficient per layer to balance the contributions of center nodes and neighborhoods. We conduct extensive experiments on eight real-world graphs and a set of synthetic graphs with varying degrees of heterophily to demonstrate how the design choices for GCNH lead to a sizable improvement over a vanilla GCN. Moreover, GCNH outperforms state-of-the-art models of much higher complexity on four out of eight benchmarks, while producing comparable results on the remaining datasets. Finally, we discuss and analyze the lower complexity of GCNH, which results in fewer trainable parameters and faster training times than other methods, and show how GCNH mitigates the oversmoothing problem.

2-hop Neighbor Class Similarity (2NCS): A graph structural metric indicative of graph neural network performance

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on graph-structured data across numerous domains. Their underlying ability to represent nodes as summaries of their vicinities has proven effective for homophilous graphs in particular, in which same-type nodes tend to connect. On heterophilous graphs, in which different-type nodes are likely connected, GNNs perform less consistently, as neighborhood information might be less representative or even misleading. On the other hand, GNN performance is not inferior on all heterophilous graphs, and there is a lack of understanding of what other graph properties affect GNN performance. In this work, we highlight the limitations of the widely used homophily ratio and the recent Cross-Class Neighborhood Similarity (CCNS) metric in estimating GNN performance. To overcome these limitations, we introduce 2-hop Neighbor Class Similarity (2NCS), a new quantitative graph structural property that correlates with GNN performance more strongly and consistently than alternative metrics. 2NCS considers two-hop neighborhoods as a theoretically derived consequence of the two-step label propagation process governing GCN's training-inference process. Experiments on one synthetic and eight real-world graph datasets confirm consistent improvements over existing metrics in estimating the accuracy of GCN- and GAT-based architectures on the node classification task.

Predicting Human Intentions from Motion Only: A 2D+3D Fusion Approach

In this paper, we address the new problem of the prediction of human intents. There is neuro-psychological evidence that actions performed by humans are anticipated by peculiar motor acts which are discriminant of the type of action going to be performed afterwards. In other words, an actual intent can be forecast by looking at the kinematics of the immediately preceding movement. To prove it in a computational and quantitative manner, we devise a new experimental setup where, without using contextual information, we predict human intents all originating from the same motor act. We posit the problem as a classification task and we introduce a new multi-modal dataset consisting of a set of motion capture marker 3D data and 2D video sequences, where, by only analysing very similar movements in both training and test phases, we are able to predict the underlying intent, i.e., the future, never observed action. We also present an extensive experimental evaluation as a baseline, customizing state-of-the-art techniques for either 3D and 2D data analysis. Realizing that video processing methods lead to inferior performance but show complementary information with respect to 3D data sequences, we developed a 2D+3D fusion analysis where we achieve better classification accuracies, attesting the superiority of the multimodal approach for the context-free prediction of human intents.

What Will I Do Next? The Intention from Motion Experiment

In computer vision, video-based approaches have been widely explored for the early classification and the prediction of actions or activities. However, it remains unclear whether this modality (as compared to 3D kinematics) can still be reliable for the prediction of human intentions, defined as the overarching goal embedded in an action sequence. Since the same action can be performed with different intentions, this problem is more challenging but yet affordable as proved by quantitative cognitive studies which exploit the 3D kinematics acquired through motion capture systems. In this paper, we bridge cognitive and computer vision studies, by demonstrating the effectiveness of video-based approaches for the prediction of human intentions. Precisely, we propose Intention from Motion, a new paradigm where, without using any contextual information, we consider instantaneous grasping motor acts involving a bottle in order to forecast why the bottle itself has been reached (to pass it or to place in a box, or to pour or to drink the liquid inside). We process only the grasping onsets casting intention prediction as a classification framework. Leveraging on our multimodal acquisition (3D motion capture data and 2D optical videos), we compare the most commonly used 3D descriptors from cognitive studies with state-of-the-art video-based techniques. Since the two analyses achieve an equivalent performance, we demonstrate that computer vision tools are effective in capturing the kinematics and facing the cognitive problem of human intention prediction.