Self-Guided Robust Graph Structure Refinement

Recent studies have revealed that GNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. To defend against such attacks, robust graph structure refinement (GSR) methods aim at minimizing the effect of adversarial edges based on node features, graph structure, or external information. However, we have discovered that existing GSR methods are limited by narrowassumptions, such as assuming clean node features, moderate structural attacks, and the availability of external clean graphs, resulting in the restricted applicability in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a self-guided GSR framework (SG-GSR), which utilizes a clean sub-graph found within the given attacked graph itself. Furthermore, we propose a novel graph augmentation and a group-training strategy to handle the two technical challenges in the clean sub-graph extraction: 1) loss of structural information, and 2) imbalanced node degree distribution. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SG-GSR under various scenarios including non-targeted attacks, targeted attacks, feature attacks, e-commerce fraud, and noisy node labels. Our code is available at https://github.com/yeonjun-in/torch-SG-GSR.

Adaptive Self-training Framework for Fine-grained Scene Graph Generation

Scene graph generation (SGG) models have suffered from inherent problems regarding the benchmark datasets such as the long-tailed predicate distribution and missing annotation problems. In this work, we aim to alleviate the long-tailed problem of SGG by utilizing unannotated triplets. To this end, we introduce a Self-Training framework for SGG (ST-SGG) that assigns pseudo-labels for unannotated triplets based on which the SGG models are trained. While there has been significant progress in self-training for image recognition, designing a self-training framework for the SGG task is more challenging due to its inherent nature such as the semantic ambiguity and the long-tailed distribution of predicate classes. Hence, we propose a novel pseudo-labeling technique for SGG, called Class-specific Adaptive Thresholding with Momentum (CATM), which is a model-agnostic framework that can be applied to any existing SGG models. Furthermore, we devise a graph structure learner (GSL) that is beneficial when adopting our proposed self-training framework to the state-of-the-art message-passing neural network (MPNN)-based SGG models. Our extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of ST-SGG on various SGG models, particularly in enhancing the performance on fine-grained predicate classes.

LLM4SGG: Large Language Model for Weakly Supervised Scene Graph Generation

Weakly-Supervised Scene Graph Generation (WSSGG) research has recently emerged as an alternative to the fully-supervised approach that heavily relies on costly annotations. In this regard, studies on WSSGG have utilized image captions to obtain unlocalized triplets while primarily focusing on grounding the unlocalized triplets over image regions. However, they have overlooked the two issues involved in the triplet formation process from the captions: 1) Semantic over-simplification issue arises when extracting triplets from captions, where fine-grained predicates in captions are undesirably converted into coarse-grained predicates, resulting in a long-tailed predicate distribution, and 2) Low-density scene graph issue arises when aligning the triplets in the caption with entity/predicate classes of interest, where many triplets are discarded and not used in training, leading to insufficient supervision. To tackle the two issues, we propose a new approach, i.e., Large Language Model for weakly-supervised SGG (LLM4SGG), where we mitigate the two issues by leveraging the LLM's in-depth understanding of language and reasoning ability during the extraction of triplets from captions and alignment of entity/predicate classes with target data. To further engage the LLM in these processes, we adopt the idea of Chain-of-Thought and the in-context few-shot learning strategy. To validate the effectiveness of LLM4SGG, we conduct extensive experiments on Visual Genome and GQA datasets, showing significant improvements in both Recall@K and mean Recall@K compared to the state-of-the-art WSSGG methods. A further appeal is that LLM4SGG is data-efficient, enabling effective model training with a small amount of training images.

Class Label-aware Graph Anomaly Detection

Unsupervised GAD methods assume the lack of anomaly labels, i.e., whether a node is anomalous or not. One common observation we made from previous unsupervised methods is that they not only assume the absence of such anomaly labels, but also the absence of class labels (the class a node belongs to used in a general node classification task). In this work, we study the utility of class labels for unsupervised GAD; in particular, how they enhance the detection of structural anomalies. To this end, we propose a Class Label-aware Graph Anomaly Detection framework (CLAD) that utilizes a limited amount of labeled nodes to enhance the performance of unsupervised GAD. Extensive experiments on ten datasets demonstrate the superior performance of CLAD in comparison to existing unsupervised GAD methods, even in the absence of ground-truth class label information. The source code for CLAD is available at \url{https://github.com/jhkim611/CLAD}.

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.

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.

Unbiased Heterogeneous Scene Graph Generation with Relation-aware Message Passing Neural Network

Recent scene graph generation (SGG) frameworks have focused on learning complex relationships among multiple objects in an image. Thanks to the nature of the message passing neural network (MPNN) that models high-order interactions between objects and their neighboring objects, they are dominant representation learning modules for SGG. However, existing MPNN-based frameworks assume the scene graph as a homogeneous graph, which restricts the context-awareness of visual relations between objects. That is, they overlook the fact that the relations tend to be highly dependent on the objects with which the relations are associated. In this paper, we propose an unbiased heterogeneous scene graph generation (HetSGG) framework that captures relation-aware context using message passing neural networks. We devise a novel message passing layer, called relation-aware message passing neural network (RMP), that aggregates the contextual information of an image considering the predicate type between objects. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that HetSGG outperforms state-of-the-art methods, especially outperforming on tail predicate classes.

LTE4G: Long-Tail Experts for Graph Neural Networks

Existing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) usually assume a balanced situation where both the class distribution and the node degree distribution are balanced. However, in real-world situations, we often encounter cases where a few classes (i.e., head class) dominate other classes (i.e., tail class) as well as in the node degree perspective, and thus naively applying existing GNNs eventually fall short of generalizing to the tail cases. Although recent studies proposed methods to handle long-tail situations on graphs, they only focus on either the class long-tailedness or the degree long-tailedness. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for training GNNs, called Long-Tail Experts for Graphs (LTE4G), which jointly considers the class long-tailedness, and the degree long-tailedness for node classification. The core idea is to assign an expert GNN model to each subset of nodes that are split in a balanced manner considering both the class and degree long-tailedness. After having trained an expert for each balanced subset, we adopt knowledge distillation to obtain two class-wise students, i.e., Head class student and Tail class student, each of which is responsible for classifying nodes in the head classes and tail classes, respectively. We demonstrate that LTE4G outperforms a wide range of state-of-the-art methods in node classification evaluated on both manual and natural imbalanced graphs. The source code of LTE4G can be found at https://github.com/SukwonYun/LTE4G.