Temporal networks serve as abstractions of many real-world dynamic systems. These networks typically evolve according to certain laws, such as the law of triadic closure, which is universal in social networks. Inductive representation learning of temporal networks should be able to capture such laws and further be applied to systems that follow the same laws but have not been unseen during the training stage. Previous works in this area depend on either network node identities or rich edge attributes and typically fail to extract these laws. Here, we propose Causal Anonymous Walks (CAWs) to inductively represent a temporal network. CAWs are extracted by temporal random walks and work as automatic retrieval of temporal network motifs to represent network dynamics while avoiding the time-consuming selection and counting of those motifs. CAWs adopt a novel anonymization strategy that replaces node identities with the hitting counts of the nodes based on a set of sampled walks to keep the method inductive, and simultaneously establish the correlation between motifs. We further propose a neural-network model CAW-N to encode CAWs, and pair it with a CAW sampling strategy with constant memory and time cost to support online training and inference. CAW-N is evaluated to predict links over 6 real temporal networks and uniformly outperforms previous SOTA methods by averaged 15% AUC gain in the inductive setting. CAW-N also outperforms previous methods in 5 out of the 6 networks in the transductive setting.
Distribution shifts can cause significant degradation in a broad range of machine learning (ML) systems deployed in the wild. However, many widely-used datasets in the ML community today were not designed for evaluating distribution shifts. These datasets typically have training and test sets drawn from the same distribution, and prior work on retrofitting them with distribution shifts has generally relied on artificial shifts that need not represent the kinds of shifts encountered in the wild. In this paper, we present WILDS, a benchmark of in-the-wild distribution shifts spanning diverse data modalities and applications, from tumor identification to wildlife monitoring to poverty mapping. WILDS builds on top of recent data collection efforts by domain experts in these applications and provides a unified collection of datasets with evaluation metrics and train/test splits that are representative of real-world distribution shifts. These datasets reflect distribution shifts arising from training and testing on different hospitals, cameras, countries, time periods, demographics, molecular scaffolds, etc., all of which cause substantial performance drops in our baseline models. Finally, we survey other applications that would be promising additions to the benchmark but for which we did not manage to find appropriate datasets; we discuss their associated challenges and detail datasets and shifts where we did not see an appreciable performance drop. By unifying datasets from a variety of application areas and making them accessible to the ML community, we hope to encourage the development of general-purpose methods that are anchored to real-world distribution shifts and that work well across different applications and problem settings. Data loaders, default models, and leaderboards are available at https://wilds.stanford.edu.
The rapid evolution of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has led to a growing number of new architectures as well as novel applications. However, current research focuses on proposing and evaluating specific architectural designs of GNNs, as opposed to studying the more general design space of GNNs that consists of a Cartesian product of different design dimensions, such as the number of layers or the type of the aggregation function. Additionally, GNN designs are often specialized to a single task, yet few efforts have been made to understand how to quickly find the best GNN design for a novel task or a novel dataset. Here we define and systematically study the architectural design space for GNNs which consists of 315,000 different designs over 32 different predictive tasks. Our approach features three key innovations: (1) A general GNN design space; (2) a GNN task space with a similarity metric, so that for a given novel task/dataset, we can quickly identify/transfer the best performing architecture; (3) an efficient and effective design space evaluation method which allows insights to be distilled from a huge number of model-task combinations. Our key results include: (1) A comprehensive set of guidelines for designing well-performing GNNs; (2) while best GNN designs for different tasks vary significantly, the GNN task space allows for transferring the best designs across different tasks; (3) models discovered using our design space achieve state-of-the-art performance. Overall, our work offers a principled and scalable approach to transition from studying individual GNN designs for specific tasks, to systematically studying the GNN design space and the task space. Finally, we release GraphGym, a powerful platform for exploring different GNN designs and tasks. GraphGym features modularized GNN implementation, standardized GNN evaluation, and reproducible and scalable experiment management.
Modern neural networks have the capacity to overfit noisy labels frequently found in real-world datasets. Although great progress has been made, existing techniques are limited in providing theoretical guarantees for the performance of the neural networks trained with noisy labels. Here we propose a novel approach with strong theoretical guarantees for robust training of deep networks trained with noisy labels. The key idea behind our method is to select weighted subsets (coresets) of clean data points that provide an approximately low-rank Jacobian matrix. We then prove that gradient descent applied to the subsets do not overfit the noisy labels. Our extensive experiments corroborate our theory and demonstrate that deep networks trained on our subsets achieve a significantly superior performance compared to state-of-the art, e.g., 6% increase in accuracy on CIFAR-10 with 80% noisy labels, and 7% increase in accuracy on mini Webvision.
Edge streams are commonly used to capture interactions in dynamic networks, such as email, social, or computer networks. The problem of detecting anomalies or rare events in edge streams has a wide range of applications. However, it presents many challenges due to lack of labels, a highly dynamic nature of interactions, and the entanglement of temporal and structural changes in the network. Current methods are limited in their ability to address the above challenges and to efficiently process a large number of interactions. Here, we propose F-FADE, a new approach for detection of anomalies in edge streams, which uses a novel frequency-factorization technique to efficiently model the time-evolving distributions of frequencies of interactions between node-pairs. The anomalies are then determined based on the likelihood of the observed frequency of each incoming interaction. F-FADE is able to handle in an online streaming setting a broad variety of anomalies with temporal and structural changes, while requiring only constant memory. Our experiments on one synthetic and six real-world dynamic networks show that F-FADE achieves state of the art performance and may detect anomalies that previous methods are unable to find.
Machine learning with missing data has been approached in two different ways, including feature imputation where missing feature values are estimated based on observed values, and label prediction where downstream labels are learned directly from incomplete data. However, existing imputation models tend to have strong prior assumptions and cannot learn from downstream tasks, while models targeting label prediction often involve heuristics and can encounter scalability issues. Here we propose GRAPE, a graph-based framework for feature imputation as well as label prediction. GRAPE tackles the missing data problem using a graph representation, where the observations and features are viewed as two types of nodes in a bipartite graph, and the observed feature values as edges. Under the GRAPE framework, the feature imputation is formulated as an edge-level prediction task and the label prediction as a node-level prediction task. These tasks are then solved with Graph Neural Networks. Experimental results on nine benchmark datasets show that GRAPE yields 20% lower mean absolute error for imputation tasks and 10% lower for label prediction tasks, compared with existing state-of-the-art methods.
Representation learning of graph-structured data is challenging because both graph structure and node features carry important information. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) provide an expressive way to fuse information from network structure and node features. However, GNNs are prone to adversarial attacks. Here we introduce Graph Information Bottleneck (GIB), an information-theoretic principle that optimally balances expressiveness and robustness of the learned representation of graph-structured data. Inheriting from the general Information Bottleneck (IB), GIB aims to learn the minimal sufficient representation for a given task by maximizing the mutual information between the representation and the target, and simultaneously constraining the mutual information between the representation and the input data. Different from the general IB, GIB regularizes the structural as well as the feature information. We design two sampling algorithms for structural regularization and instantiate the GIB principle with two new models: GIB-Cat and GIB-Bern, and demonstrate the benefits by evaluating the resilience to adversarial attacks. We show that our proposed models are more robust than state-of-the-art graph defense models. GIB-based models empirically achieve up to 31% improvement with adversarial perturbation of the graph structure as well as node features.
One of the fundamental problems in Artificial Intelligence is to perform complex multi-hop logical reasoning over the facts captured by a knowledge graph (KG). This problem is challenging, because KGs can be massive and incomplete. Recent approaches embed KG entities in a low dimensional space and then use these embeddings to find the answer entities. However, it has been an outstanding challenge of how to handle arbitrary first-order logic (FOL) queries as present methods are limited to only a subset of FOL operators. In particular, the negation operator is not supported. An additional limitation of present methods is also that they cannot naturally model uncertainty. Here, we present BetaE, a probabilistic embedding framework for answering arbitrary FOL queries over KGs. BetaE is the first method that can handle a complete set of first-order logical operations: conjunction ($\wedge$), disjunction ($\vee$), and negation ($\neg$). A key insight of BetaE is to use probabilistic distributions with bounded support, specifically the Beta distribution, and embed queries/entities as distributions, which as a consequence allows us to also faithfully model uncertainty. Logical operations are performed in the embedding space by neural operators over the probabilistic embeddings. We demonstrate the performance of BetaE on answering arbitrary FOL queries on three large, incomplete KGs. While being more general, BetaE also increases relative performance by up to 25.4% over the current state-of-the-art KG reasoning methods that can only handle conjunctive queries without negation.
Introducing self-attention mechanism in graph neural networks (GNNs) achieved state-of-the-art performance for graph representation learning. However, at every layer, attention is only computed between two connected nodes and depends solely on the representation of both nodes. This attention computation cannot account for the multi-hop neighbors which supply graph structure context information and have influence on the node representation learning as well. In this paper, we propose Direct Multi-hop Attention based Graph neural Network (DAGN) for graph representation learning, a principled way to incorporate multi-hop neighboring context into attention computation, enabling long-range interactions at every layer. To compute attention between nodes that are multiple hops away, DAGN diffuses the attention scores from neighboring nodes to non-neighboring nodes, thus increasing the receptive field for every message passing layer. Unlike previous methods, DAGN uses a diffusion prior on attention values, to efficiently account for all paths between the pair of nodes when computing multi-hop attention weights. This helps DAGN capture large-scale structural information in a single layer, and learn more informative attention distribution. Experimental results on standard semi-supervised node classification as well as the knowledge graph completion show that DAGN achieves state-of-the-art results: DAGN achieves up to 5.7% relative error reduction over the previous state-of-the-art on Cora, Citeseer, and Pubmed. DAGN also obtains the best performance on a large-scale Open Graph Benchmark dataset. On knowledge graph completion DAGN advances state-of-the-art on WN18RR and FB15k-237 across four different performance metrics.