Inductive Linear Probing for Few-shot Node Classification

Meta-learning has emerged as a powerful training strategy for few-shot node classification, demonstrating its effectiveness in the transductive setting. However, the existing literature predominantly focuses on transductive few-shot node classification, neglecting the widely studied inductive setting in the broader few-shot learning community. This oversight limits our comprehensive understanding of the performance of meta-learning based methods on graph data. In this work, we conduct an empirical study to highlight the limitations of current frameworks in the inductive few-shot node classification setting. Additionally, we propose a simple yet competitive baseline approach specifically tailored for inductive few-shot node classification tasks. We hope our work can provide a new path forward to better understand how the meta-learning paradigm works in the graph domain.

Virtual Node Tuning for Few-shot Node Classification

Few-shot Node Classification (FSNC) is a challenge in graph representation learning where only a few labeled nodes per class are available for training. To tackle this issue, meta-learning has been proposed to transfer structural knowledge from base classes with abundant labels to target novel classes. However, existing solutions become ineffective or inapplicable when base classes have no or limited labeled nodes. To address this challenge, we propose an innovative method dubbed Virtual Node Tuning (VNT). Our approach utilizes a pretrained graph transformer as the encoder and injects virtual nodes as soft prompts in the embedding space, which can be optimized with few-shot labels in novel classes to modulate node embeddings for each specific FSNC task. A unique feature of VNT is that, by incorporating a Graph-based Pseudo Prompt Evolution (GPPE) module, VNT-GPPE can handle scenarios with sparse labels in base classes. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach in addressing FSNC with unlabeled or sparsely labeled base classes, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods and even fully supervised baselines.

Learning Strong Graph Neural Networks with Weak Information

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have exhibited impressive performance in many graph learning tasks. Nevertheless, the performance of GNNs can deteriorate when the input graph data suffer from weak information, i.e., incomplete structure, incomplete features, and insufficient labels. Most prior studies, which attempt to learn from the graph data with a specific type of weak information, are far from effective in dealing with the scenario where diverse data deficiencies exist and mutually affect each other. To fill the gap, in this paper, we aim to develop an effective and principled approach to the problem of graph learning with weak information (GLWI). Based on the findings from our empirical analysis, we derive two design focal points for solving the problem of GLWI, i.e., enabling long-range propagation in GNNs and allowing information propagation to those stray nodes isolated from the largest connected component. Accordingly, we propose D$^2$PT, a dual-channel GNN framework that performs long-range information propagation not only on the input graph with incomplete structure, but also on a global graph that encodes global semantic similarities. We further develop a prototype contrastive alignment algorithm that aligns the class-level prototypes learned from two channels, such that the two different information propagation processes can mutually benefit from each other and the finally learned model can well handle the GLWI problem. Extensive experiments on eight real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed methods in various GLWI scenarios.

HyperFormer: Learning Expressive Sparse Feature Representations via Hypergraph Transformer

Learning expressive representations for high-dimensional yet sparse features has been a longstanding problem in information retrieval. Though recent deep learning methods can partially solve the problem, they often fail to handle the numerous sparse features, particularly those tail feature values with infrequent occurrences in the training data. Worse still, existing methods cannot explicitly leverage the correlations among different instances to help further improve the representation learning on sparse features since such relational prior knowledge is not provided. To address these challenges, in this paper, we tackle the problem of representation learning on feature-sparse data from a graph learning perspective. Specifically, we propose to model the sparse features of different instances using hypergraphs where each node represents a data instance and each hyperedge denotes a distinct feature value. By passing messages on the constructed hypergraphs based on our Hypergraph Transformer (HyperFormer), the learned feature representations capture not only the correlations among different instances but also the correlations among features. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach can effectively improve feature representation learning on sparse features.

SwinFSR: Stereo Image Super-Resolution using SwinIR and Frequency Domain Knowledge

Stereo Image Super-Resolution (stereoSR) has attracted significant attention in recent years due to the extensive deployment of dual cameras in mobile phones, autonomous vehicles and robots. In this work, we propose a new StereoSR method, named SwinFSR, based on an extension of SwinIR, originally designed for single image restoration, and the frequency domain knowledge obtained by the Fast Fourier Convolution (FFC). Specifically, to effectively gather global information, we modify the Residual Swin Transformer blocks (RSTBs) in SwinIR by explicitly incorporating the frequency domain knowledge using the FFC and employing the resulting residual Swin Fourier Transformer blocks (RSFTBs) for feature extraction. Besides, for the efficient and accurate fusion of stereo views, we propose a new cross-attention module referred to as RCAM, which achieves highly competitive performance while requiring less computational cost than the state-of-the-art cross-attention modules. Extensive experimental results and ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed SwinFSR.

A Data-Centric Solution to NonHomogeneous Dehazing via Vision Transformer

Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in image dehazing. Many deep learning methods have been proposed to tackle this challenge, and have made significant accomplishments dealing with homogeneous haze. However, these solutions cannot maintain comparable performance when they are applied to images with non-homogeneous haze, e.g., NH-HAZE23 dataset introduced by NTIRE challenges. One of the reasons for such failures is that non-homogeneous haze does not obey one of the assumptions that is required for modeling homogeneous haze. In addition, a large number of pairs of non-homogeneous hazy image and the clean counterpart is required using traditional end-to-end training approaches, while NH-HAZE23 dataset is of limited quantities. Although it is possible to augment the NH-HAZE23 dataset by leveraging other non-homogeneous dehazing datasets, we observe that it is necessary to design a proper data-preprocessing approach that reduces the distribution gaps between the target dataset and the augmented one. This finding indeed aligns with the essence of data-centric AI. With a novel network architecture and a principled data-preprocessing approach that systematically enhances data quality, we present an innovative dehazing method. Specifically, we apply RGB-channel-wise transformations on the augmented datasets, and incorporate the state-of-the-art transformers as the backbone in the two-branch framework. We conduct extensive experiments and ablation study to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Fairness through Aleatoric Uncertainty

We propose a unique solution to tackle the often-competing goals of fairness and utility in machine learning classification tasks. While fairness ensures that the model's predictions are unbiased and do not discriminate against any particular group, utility focuses on maximizing the accuracy of the model's predictions. Our aim is to investigate the relationship between uncertainty and fairness. Our approach leverages this concept by employing Bayesian learning to estimate the uncertainty in sample predictions where the estimation is independent of confounding effects related to the protected attribute. Through empirical evidence, we show that samples with low classification uncertainty are modeled more accurately and fairly than those with high uncertainty, which may have biased representations and higher prediction errors. To address the challenge of balancing fairness and utility, we propose a novel fairness-utility objective that is defined based on uncertainty quantification. The weights in this objective are determined by the level of uncertainty, allowing us to optimize both fairness and utility simultaneously. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of the fairness-utility tradeoff and this applies to both group and individual fairness metrics. This work presents a fresh perspective on the trade-off between accuracy and fairness in machine learning and highlights the potential of using uncertainty as a means to achieve optimal fairness and utility.

Contrastive Semi-supervised Learning for Underwater Image Restoration via Reliable Bank

Despite the remarkable achievement of recent underwater image restoration techniques, the lack of labeled data has become a major hurdle for further progress. In this work, we propose a mean-teacher based Semi-supervised Underwater Image Restoration (Semi-UIR) framework to incorporate the unlabeled data into network training. However, the naive mean-teacher method suffers from two main problems: (1) The consistency loss used in training might become ineffective when the teacher's prediction is wrong. (2) Using L1 distance may cause the network to overfit wrong labels, resulting in confirmation bias. To address the above problems, we first introduce a reliable bank to store the "best-ever" outputs as pseudo ground truth. To assess the quality of outputs, we conduct an empirical analysis based on the monotonicity property to select the most trustworthy NR-IQA method. Besides, in view of the confirmation bias problem, we incorporate contrastive regularization to prevent the overfitting on wrong labels. Experimental results on both full-reference and non-reference underwater benchmarks demonstrate that our algorithm has obvious improvement over SOTA methods quantitatively and qualitatively. Code has been released at https://github.com/Huang-ShiRui/Semi-UIR.

Stylometric Detection of AI-Generated Text in Twitter Timelines

Recent advancements in pre-trained language models have enabled convenient methods for generating human-like text at a large scale. Though these generation capabilities hold great potential for breakthrough applications, it can also be a tool for an adversary to generate misinformation. In particular, social media platforms like Twitter are highly susceptible to AI-generated misinformation. A potential threat scenario is when an adversary hijacks a credible user account and incorporates a natural language generator to generate misinformation. Such threats necessitate automated detectors for AI-generated tweets in a given user's Twitter timeline. However, tweets are inherently short, thus making it difficult for current state-of-the-art pre-trained language model-based detectors to accurately detect at what point the AI starts to generate tweets in a given Twitter timeline. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm using stylometric signals to aid detecting AI-generated tweets. We propose models corresponding to quantifying stylistic changes in human and AI tweets in two related tasks: Task 1 - discriminate between human and AI-generated tweets, and Task 2 - detect if and when an AI starts to generate tweets in a given Twitter timeline. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the stylometric features are effective in augmenting the state-of-the-art AI-generated text detectors.

Detecting Harmful Agendas in News Articles

Manipulated news online is a growing problem which necessitates the use of automated systems to curtail its spread. We argue that while misinformation and disinformation detection have been studied, there has been a lack of investment in the important open challenge of detecting harmful agendas in news articles; identifying harmful agendas is critical to flag news campaigns with the greatest potential for real world harm. Moreover, due to real concerns around censorship, harmful agenda detectors must be interpretable to be effective. In this work, we propose this new task and release a dataset, NewsAgendas, of annotated news articles for agenda identification. We show how interpretable systems can be effective on this task and demonstrate that they can perform comparably to black-box models.