Recently unsupervised representation learning (URL) has achieved remarkable progress in various scenarios. However, most methods are specifically designed based on specific data characters or task assumptions. Based on the manifold assumption, we regard most URL problems as an embedding problem that seeks an optimal low-dimensional representation of the given high-dimensional data. We split the embedding process into two steps, data structural modeling and low-dimensional embedding, and propose a general similarity-based framework called GenURL. Specifically, we provide a general method to model data structures by adaptively combining graph distances on the feature space and predefined graphs, then propose robust loss functions to learn the low-dimensional embedding. Combining with a specific pretext task, we can adapt GenURL to various URL tasks in a unified manner and achieve state-of-the-art performance, including self-supervised visual representation learning, unsupervised knowledge distillation, graph embeddings, and dimension reduction. Moreover, ablation studies of loss functions and basic hyper-parameter settings in GenURL illustrate the data characters of various tasks.
Gray-box graph attacks aim at disrupting the performance of the victim model by using inconspicuous attacks with limited knowledge of the victim model. The parameters of the victim model and the labels of the test nodes are invisible to the attacker. To obtain the gradient on the node attributes or graph structure, the attacker constructs an imaginary surrogate model trained under supervision. However, there is a lack of discussion on the training of surrogate models and the robustness of provided gradient information. The general node classification model loses the topology of the nodes on the graph, which is, in fact, an exploitable prior for the attacker. This paper investigates the effect of representation learning of surrogate models on the transferability of gray-box graph adversarial attacks. To reserve the topology in the surrogate embedding, we propose Surrogate Representation Learning with Isometric Mapping (SRLIM). By using Isometric mapping method, our proposed SRLIM can constrain the topological structure of nodes from the input layer to the embedding space, that is, to maintain the similarity of nodes in the propagation process. Experiments prove the effectiveness of our approach through the improvement in the performance of the adversarial attacks generated by the gradient-based attacker in untargeted poisoning gray-box setups.
Contrastive learning (CL) has emerged as a dominant technique for unsupervised representation learning which embeds augmented versions of the anchor close to each other (positive samples) and pushes the embeddings of other samples (negative samples) apart. As revealed in recent works, CL can benefit from hard negative samples (negative samples that are difficult to distinguish from the anchor). However, we observe minor improvement or even performance drop when we adopt existing hard negative mining techniques in Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL). We find that many hard negative samples similar to anchor point are false negative ones (samples from the same class as anchor point) in GCL, which is different from CL in computer vision and will lead to unsatisfactory performance of existing hard negative mining techniques in GCL. To eliminate this bias, we propose Debiased Graph Contrastive Learning (DGCL), a novel and effective method to estimate the probability whether each negative sample is true or not. With this probability, we devise two schemes (i.e., DGCL-weight and DGCL-mix) to boost the performance of GCL. Empirically, DGCL outperforms or matches previous unsupervised state-of-the-art results on several benchmarks and even exceeds the performance of supervised ones.
Noisy labels, resulting from mistakes in manual labeling or webly data collecting for supervised learning, can cause neural networks to overfit the misleading information and degrade the generalization performance. Self-supervised learning works in the absence of labels and thus eliminates the negative impact of noisy labels. Motivated by co-training with both supervised learning view and self-supervised learning view, we propose a simple yet effective method called Co-learning for learning with noisy labels. Co-learning performs supervised learning and self-supervised learning in a cooperative way. The constraints of intrinsic similarity with the self-supervised module and the structural similarity with the noisily-supervised module are imposed on a shared common feature encoder to regularize the network to maximize the agreement between the two constraints. Co-learning is compared with peer methods on corrupted data from benchmark datasets fairly, and extensive results are provided which demonstrate that Co-learning is superior to many state-of-the-art approaches.
Longitudinal Dispersion(LD) is the dominant process of scalar transport in natural streams. An accurate prediction on LD coefficient(Dl) can produce a performance leap in related simulation. The emerging machine learning(ML) techniques provide a self-adaptive tool for this problem. However, most of the existing studies utilize an unproved quaternion feature set, obtained through simple theoretical deduction. Few studies have put attention on its reliability and rationality. Besides, due to the lack of comparative comparison, the proper choice of ML models in different scenarios still remains unknown. In this study, the Feature Gradient selector was first adopted to distill the local optimal feature sets directly from multivariable data. Then, a global optimal feature set (the channel width, the flow velocity, the channel slope and the cross sectional area) was proposed through numerical comparison of the distilled local optimums in performance with representative ML models. The channel slope is identified to be the key parameter for the prediction of LDC. Further, we designed a weighted evaluation metric which enables comprehensive model comparison. With the simple linear model as the baseline, a benchmark of single and ensemble learning models was provided. Advantages and disadvantages of the methods involved were also discussed. Results show that the support vector machine has significantly better performance than other models. Decision tree is not suitable for this problem due to poor generalization ability. Notably, simple models show superiority over complicated model on this low-dimensional problem, for their better balance between regression and generalization.
A better understanding of dispersion in natural streams requires knowledge of longitudinal dispersion coefficient(LDC). Various methods have been proposed for predictions of LDC. Those studies can be grouped into three types: analytical, statistical and ML-driven researches(Implicit and explicit). However, a comprehensive evaluation of them is still lacking. In this paper, we first present an in-depth analysis of those methods and find out their defects. This is carried out on an extensive database composed of 660 samples of hydraulic and channel properties worldwide. The reliability and representativeness of utilized data are enhanced through the deployment of the Subset Selection of Maximum Dissimilarity(SSMD) for testing set selection and the Inter Quartile Range(IQR) for removal of the outlier. The evaluation reveals the rank of those methods as: ML-driven method > the statistical method > the analytical method. Whereas implicit ML-driven methods are black-boxes in nature, explicit ML-driven methods have more potential in prediction of LDC. Besides, overfitting is a universal problem in existing models. Those models also suffer from a fixed parameter combination. To establish an interpretable model for LDC prediction with higher performance, we then design a novel symbolic regression method called evolutionary symbolic regression network(ESRN). It is a combination of genetic algorithms and neural networks. Strategies are introduced to avoid overfitting and explore more parameter combinations. Results show that the ESRN model has superiorities over other existing symbolic models in performance. The proposed model is suitable for practical engineering problems due to its advantage in low requirement of parameters (only w and U* are required). It can provide convincing solutions for situations where the field test cannot be carried out or limited field information can be obtained.
Self-supervised contrastive learning has demonstrated great potential in learning visual representations. Despite their success on various downstream tasks such as image classification and object detection, self-supervised pre-training for fine-grained scenarios is not fully explored. In this paper, we first point out that current contrastive methods are prone to memorizing background/foreground texture and therefore have a limitation in localizing the foreground object. Analysis suggests that learning to extract discriminative texture information and localization are equally crucial for self-supervised pre-training under fine-grained scenarios. Based on our findings, we introduce Cross-view Saliency Alignment (CVSA), a contrastive learning framework that first crops and swaps saliency regions of images as a novel view generation and then guides the model to localize on the foreground object via a cross-view alignment loss. Extensive experiments on four popular fine-grained classification benchmarks show that CVSA significantly improves the learned representation.
A better understanding of dispersion in natural streams requires knowledge of longitudinal dispersion coefficient(LDC). Various methods have been proposed for predictions of LDC. Those studies can be grouped into three types: analytical, statistical and ML-driven researches(Implicit and explicit). However, a comprehensive evaluation of them is still lacking. In this paper, we first present an in-depth analysis of those methods and find out their defects. This is carried out on an extensive database composed of 660 samples of hydraulic and channel properties worldwide. The reliability and representativeness of utilized data are enhanced through the deployment of the Subset Selection of Maximum Dissimilarity(SSMD) for testing set selection and the Inter Quartile Range(IQR) for removal of the outlier. The evaluation reveals the rank of those methods as: ML-driven method > the statistical method > the analytical method. Whereas implicit ML-driven methods are black-boxes in nature, explicit ML-driven methods have more potential in prediction of LDC. Besides, overfitting is a universal problem in existing models. Those models also suffer from a fixed parameter combination. To establish an interpretable model for LDC prediction with higher performance, we then design a novel symbolic regression method called evolutionary symbolic regression network(ESRN). It is a combination of genetic algorithms and neural networks. Strategies are introduced to avoid overfitting and explore more parameter combinations. Results show that the ESRN model has superiorities over other existing symbolic models in performance. The proposed model is suitable for practical engineering problems due to its advantage in low requirement of parameters (only w and U* are required). It can provide convincing solutions for situations where the field test cannot be carried out or limited field information can be obtained.
Unsupervised attributed graph representation learning is challenging since both structural and feature information are required to be represented in the latent space. Existing methods concentrate on learning latent representation via reconstruction tasks, but cannot directly optimize representation and are prone to oversmoothing, thus limiting the applications on downstream tasks. To alleviate these issues, we propose a novel graph embedding framework named Deep Manifold Attributed Graph Embedding (DMAGE). A node-to-node geodesic similarity is proposed to compute the inter-node similarity between the data space and the latent space and then use Bergman divergence as loss function to minimize the difference between them. We then design a new network structure with fewer aggregation to alleviate the oversmoothing problem and incorporate graph structure augmentation to improve the representation's stability. Our proposed DMAGE surpasses state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin on three downstream tasks: unsupervised visualization, node clustering, and link prediction across four popular datasets.