MUSE: Music Recommender System with Shuffle Play Recommendation Enhancement

Recommender systems have become indispensable in music streaming services, enhancing user experiences by personalizing playlists and facilitating the serendipitous discovery of new music. However, the existing recommender systems overlook the unique challenges inherent in the music domain, specifically shuffle play, which provides subsequent tracks in a random sequence. Based on our observation that the shuffle play sessions hinder the overall training process of music recommender systems mainly due to the high unique transition rates of shuffle play sessions, we propose a Music Recommender System with Shuffle Play Recommendation Enhancement (MUSE). MUSE employs the self-supervised learning framework that maximizes the agreement between the original session and the augmented session, which is augmented by our novel session augmentation method, called transition-based augmentation. To further facilitate the alignment of the representations between the two views, we devise two fine-grained matching strategies, i.e., item- and similarity-based matching strategies. Through rigorous experiments conducted across diverse environments, we demonstrate MUSE's efficacy over 12 baseline models on a large-scale Music Streaming Sessions Dataset (MSSD) from Spotify. The source code of MUSE is available at \url{https://github.com/yunhak0/MUSE}.

S-Mixup: Structural Mixup for Graph Neural Networks

Existing studies for applying the mixup technique on graphs mainly focus on graph classification tasks, while the research in node classification is still under-explored. In this paper, we propose a novel mixup augmentation for node classification called Structural Mixup (S-Mixup). The core idea is to take into account the structural information while mixing nodes. Specifically, S-Mixup obtains pseudo-labels for unlabeled nodes in a graph along with their prediction confidence via a Graph Neural Network (GNN) classifier. These serve as the criteria for the composition of the mixup pool for both inter and intra-class mixups. Furthermore, we utilize the edge gradient obtained from the GNN training and propose a gradient-based edge selection strategy for selecting edges to be attached to the nodes generated by the mixup. Through extensive experiments on real-world benchmark datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of S-Mixup evaluated on the node classification task. We observe that S-Mixup enhances the robustness and generalization performance of GNNs, especially in heterophilous situations. The source code of S-Mixup can be found at \url{https://github.com/SukwonYun/S-Mixup}

Quantum Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Mobility Cooperation

For Industry 4.0 Revolution, cooperative autonomous mobility systems are widely used based on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, the MARL-based algorithms suffer from huge parameter utilization and convergence difficulties with many agents. To tackle these problems, a quantum MARL (QMARL) algorithm based on the concept of actor-critic network is proposed, which is beneficial in terms of scalability, to deal with the limitations in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era. Additionally, our QMARL is also beneficial in terms of efficient parameter utilization and fast convergence due to quantum supremacy. Note that the reward in our QMARL is defined as task precision over computation time in multiple agents, thus, multi-agent cooperation can be realized. For further improvement, an additional technique for scalability is proposed, which is called projection value measure (PVM). Based on PVM, our proposed QMARL can achieve the highest reward, by reducing the action dimension into a logarithmic-scale. Finally, we can conclude that our proposed QMARL with PVM outperforms the other algorithms in terms of efficient parameter utilization, fast convergence, and scalability.

Two Tales of Platoon Intelligence for Autonomous Mobility Control: Enabling Deep Learning Recipes

This paper presents the deep learning-based recent achievements to resolve the problem of autonomous mobility control and efficient resource management of autonomous vehicles and UAVs, i.e., (i) multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), and (ii) neural Myerson auction. Representatively, communication network (CommNet), which is one of the most popular MARL algorithms, is introduced to enable multiple agents to take actions in a distributed manner for their shared goals by training all agents' states and actions in a single neural network. Moreover, the neural Myerson auction guarantees trustfulness among multiple agents as well as achieves the optimal revenue of highly dynamic systems. Therefore, we survey the recent studies on autonomous mobility control based on MARL and neural Myerson auction. Furthermore, we emphasize that integration of MARL and neural Myerson auction is expected to be critical for efficient and trustful autonomous mobility services.

Unsupervised Episode Generation for Graph Meta-learning

In this paper, we investigate Unsupervised Episode Generation methods to solve Few-Shot Node-Classification (FSNC) problem via Meta-learning without labels. Dominant meta-learning methodologies for FSNC were developed under the existence of abundant labeled nodes for training, which however may not be possible to obtain in the real-world. Although few studies have been proposed to tackle the label-scarcity problem, they still rely on a limited amount of labeled data, which hinders the full utilization of the information of all nodes in a graph. Despite the effectiveness of Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) approaches on FSNC without labels, they mainly learn generic node embeddings without consideration on the downstream task to be solved, which may limit its performance. In this work, we propose unsupervised episode generation methods to benefit from their generalization ability for FSNC tasks while resolving label-scarcity problem. We first propose a method that utilizes graph augmentation to generate training episodes called g-UMTRA, which however has several drawbacks, i.e., 1) increased training time due to the computation of augmented features and 2) low applicability to existing baselines. Hence, we propose Neighbors as Queries (NaQ), which generates episodes from structural neighbors found by graph diffusion. Our proposed methods are model-agnostic, that is, they can be plugged into any existing graph meta-learning models, while not sacrificing much of their performance or sometimes even improving them. We provide theoretical insights to support why our unsupervised episode generation methodologies work, and extensive experimental results demonstrate the potential of our unsupervised episode generation methods for graph meta-learning towards FSNC problems.

Similarity Preserving Adversarial Graph Contrastive Learning

Recent works demonstrate that GNN models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which refer to imperceptible perturbation on the graph structure and node features. Among various GNN models, graph contrastive learning (GCL) based methods specifically suffer from adversarial attacks due to their inherent design that highly depends on the self-supervision signals derived from the original graph, which however already contains noise when the graph is attacked. To achieve adversarial robustness against such attacks, existing methods adopt adversarial training (AT) to the GCL framework, which considers the attacked graph as an augmentation under the GCL framework. However, we find that existing adversarially trained GCL methods achieve robustness at the expense of not being able to preserve the node feature similarity. In this paper, we propose a similarity-preserving adversarial graph contrastive learning (SP-AGCL) framework that contrasts the clean graph with two auxiliary views of different properties (i.e., the node similarity-preserving view and the adversarial view). Extensive experiments demonstrate that SP-AGCL achieves a competitive performance on several downstream tasks, and shows its effectiveness in various scenarios, e.g., a network with adversarial attacks, noisy labels, and heterophilous neighbors. Our code is available at https://github.com/yeonjun-in/torch-SP-AGCL.

Task Relation-aware Continual User Representation Learning

User modeling, which learns to represent users into a low-dimensional representation space based on their past behaviors, got a surge of interest from the industry for providing personalized services to users. Previous efforts in user modeling mainly focus on learning a task-specific user representation that is designed for a single task. However, since learning task-specific user representations for every task is infeasible, recent studies introduce the concept of universal user representation, which is a more generalized representation of a user that is relevant to a variety of tasks. Despite their effectiveness, existing approaches for learning universal user representations are impractical in real-world applications due to the data requirement, catastrophic forgetting and the limited learning capability for continually added tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel continual user representation learning method, called TERACON, whose learning capability is not limited as the number of learned tasks increases while capturing the relationship between the tasks. The main idea is to introduce an embedding for each task, i.e., task embedding, which is utilized to generate task-specific soft masks that not only allow the entire model parameters to be updated until the end of training sequence, but also facilitate the relationship between the tasks to be captured. Moreover, we introduce a novel knowledge retention module with pseudo-labeling strategy that successfully alleviates the long-standing problem of continual learning, i.e., catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments on public and proprietary real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority and practicality of TERACON. Our code is available at https://github.com/Sein-Kim/TERACON.

Task-Equivariant Graph Few-shot Learning

Although Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been successful in node classification tasks, their performance heavily relies on the availability of a sufficient number of labeled nodes per class. In real-world situations, not all classes have many labeled nodes and there may be instances where the model needs to classify new classes, making manual labeling difficult. To solve this problem, it is important for GNNs to be able to classify nodes with a limited number of labeled nodes, known as few-shot node classification. Previous episodic meta-learning based methods have demonstrated success in few-shot node classification, but our findings suggest that optimal performance can only be achieved with a substantial amount of diverse training meta-tasks. To address this challenge of meta-learning based few-shot learning (FSL), we propose a new approach, the Task-Equivariant Graph few-shot learning (TEG) framework. Our TEG framework enables the model to learn transferable task-adaptation strategies using a limited number of training meta-tasks, allowing it to acquire meta-knowledge for a wide range of meta-tasks. By incorporating equivariant neural networks, TEG can utilize their strong generalization abilities to learn highly adaptable task-specific strategies. As a result, TEG achieves state-of-the-art performance with limited training meta-tasks. Our experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate TEG's superiority in terms of accuracy and generalization ability, even when using minimal meta-training data, highlighting the effectiveness of our proposed approach in addressing the challenges of meta-learning based few-shot node classification. Our code is available at the following link: https://github.com/sung-won-kim/TEG

Shift-Robust Molecular Relational Learning with Causal Substructure

Recently, molecular relational learning, whose goal is to predict the interaction behavior between molecular pairs, got a surge of interest in molecular sciences due to its wide range of applications. In this work, we propose CMRL that is robust to the distributional shift in molecular relational learning by detecting the core substructure that is causally related to chemical reactions. To do so, we first assume a causal relationship based on the domain knowledge of molecular sciences and construct a structural causal model (SCM) that reveals the relationship between variables. Based on the SCM, we introduce a novel conditional intervention framework whose intervention is conditioned on the paired molecule. With the conditional intervention framework, our model successfully learns from the causal substructure and alleviates the confounding effect of shortcut substructures that are spuriously correlated to chemical reactions. Extensive experiments on various tasks with real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate the superiority of CMRL over state-of-the-art baseline models. Our code is available at https://github.com/Namkyeong/CMRL.

Conditional Graph Information Bottleneck for Molecular Relational Learning

Molecular relational learning, whose goal is to learn the interaction behavior between molecular pairs, got a surge of interest in molecular sciences due to its wide range of applications. Recently, graph neural networks have recently shown great success in molecular relational learning by modeling a molecule as a graph structure, and considering atom-level interactions between two molecules. Despite their success, existing molecular relational learning methods tend to overlook the nature of chemistry, i.e., a chemical compound is composed of multiple substructures such as functional groups that cause distinctive chemical reactions. In this work, we propose a novel relational learning framework, called CGIB, that predicts the interaction behavior between a pair of graphs by detecting core subgraphs therein. The main idea is, given a pair of graphs, to find a subgraph from a graph that contains the minimal sufficient information regarding the task at hand conditioned on the paired graph based on the principle of conditional graph information bottleneck. We argue that our proposed method mimics the nature of chemical reactions, i.e., the core substructure of a molecule varies depending on which other molecule it interacts with. Extensive experiments on various tasks with real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of CGIB over state-of-the-art baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/Namkyeong/CGIB.