Node Embedding for Homophilous Graphs with ARGEW: Augmentation of Random walks by Graph Edge Weights

Representing nodes in a network as dense vectors node embeddings is important for understanding a given network and solving many downstream tasks. In particular, for weighted homophilous graphs where similar nodes are connected with larger edge weights, we desire node embeddings where node pairs with strong weights have closer embeddings. Although random walk based node embedding methods like node2vec and node2vec+ do work for weighted networks via including edge weights in the walk transition probabilities, our experiments show that the embedding result does not adequately reflect edge weights. In this paper, we propose ARGEW (Augmentation of Random walks by Graph Edge Weights), a novel augmentation method for random walks that expands the corpus in such a way that nodes with larger edge weights end up with closer embeddings. ARGEW can work with any random walk based node embedding method, because it is independent of the random sampling strategy itself and works on top of the already-performed walks. With several real-world networks, we demonstrate that with ARGEW, compared to not using it, the desired pattern that node pairs with larger edge weights have closer embeddings is much clearer. We also examine ARGEW's performance in node classification: node2vec with ARGEW outperforms pure node2vec and is not sensitive to hyperparameters (i.e. consistently good). In fact, it achieves similarly good results as supervised GCN, even without any node feature or label information during training. Finally, we explain why ARGEW works consistently well by exploring the coappearance distributions using a synthetic graph with clear structural roles.

Gradient-based Bit Encoding Optimization for Noise-Robust Binary Memristive Crossbar

Binary memristive crossbars have gained huge attention as an energy-efficient deep learning hardware accelerator. Nonetheless, they suffer from various noises due to the analog nature of the crossbars. To overcome such limitations, most previous works train weight parameters with noise data obtained from a crossbar. These methods are, however, ineffective because it is difficult to collect noise data in large-volume manufacturing environment where each crossbar has a large device/circuit level variation. Moreover, we argue that there is still room for improvement even though these methods somewhat improve accuracy. This paper explores a new perspective on mitigating crossbar noise in a more generalized way by manipulating input binary bit encoding rather than training the weight of networks with respect to noise data. We first mathematically show that the noise decreases as the number of binary bit encoding pulses increases when representing the same amount of information. In addition, we propose Gradient-based Bit Encoding Optimization (GBO) which optimizes a different number of pulses at each layer, based on our in-depth analysis that each layer has a different level of noise sensitivity. The proposed heterogeneous layer-wise bit encoding scheme achieves high noise robustness with low computational cost. Our experimental results on public benchmark datasets show that GBO improves the classification accuracy by ~5-40% in severe noise scenarios.

Learning to Discover Cross-Domain Relations with Generative Adversarial Networks

While humans easily recognize relations between data from different domains without any supervision, learning to automatically discover them is in general very challenging and needs many ground-truth pairs that illustrate the relations. To avoid costly pairing, we address the task of discovering cross-domain relations given unpaired data. We propose a method based on generative adversarial networks that learns to discover relations between different domains (DiscoGAN). Using the discovered relations, our proposed network successfully transfers style from one domain to another while preserving key attributes such as orientation and face identity. Source code for official implementation is publicly available https://github.com/SKTBrain/DiscoGAN