AcademicGPT: Empowering Academic Research

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across various natural language processing tasks. Yet, many of these advanced LLMs are tailored for broad, general-purpose applications. In this technical report, we introduce AcademicGPT, designed specifically to empower academic research. AcademicGPT is a continual training model derived from LLaMA2-70B. Our training corpus mainly consists of academic papers, thesis, content from some academic domain, high-quality Chinese data and others. While it may not be extensive in data scale, AcademicGPT marks our initial venture into a domain-specific GPT tailored for research area. We evaluate AcademicGPT on several established public benchmarks such as MMLU and CEval, as well as on some specialized academic benchmarks like PubMedQA, SCIEval, and our newly-created ComputerScienceQA, to demonstrate its ability from general knowledge ability, to Chinese ability, and to academic ability. Building upon AcademicGPT's foundation model, we also developed several applications catered to the academic area, including General Academic Question Answering, AI-assisted Paper Reading, Paper Review, and AI-assisted Title and Abstract Generation.

Privacy-preserving design of graph neural networks with applications to vertical federated learning

The paradigm of vertical federated learning (VFL), where institutions collaboratively train machine learning models via combining each other's local feature or label information, has achieved great success in applications to financial risk management (FRM). The surging developments of graph representation learning (GRL) have opened up new opportunities for FRM applications under FL via efficiently utilizing the graph-structured data generated from underlying transaction networks. Meanwhile, transaction information is often considered highly sensitive. To prevent data leakage during training, it is critical to develop FL protocols with formal privacy guarantees. In this paper, we present an end-to-end GRL framework in the VFL setting called VESPER, which is built upon a general privatization scheme termed perturbed message passing (PMP) that allows the privatization of many popular graph neural architectures.Based on PMP, we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of specific design choices of concrete graph neural architectures and provide solutions and improvements for both dense and sparse graphs. Extensive empirical evaluations over both public datasets and an industry dataset demonstrate that VESPER is capable of training high-performance GNN models over both sparse and dense graphs under reasonable privacy budgets.

OptIForest: Optimal Isolation Forest for Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection plays an increasingly important role in various fields for critical tasks such as intrusion detection in cybersecurity, financial risk detection, and human health monitoring. A variety of anomaly detection methods have been proposed, and a category based on the isolation forest mechanism stands out due to its simplicity, effectiveness, and efficiency, e.g., iForest is often employed as a state-of-the-art detector for real deployment. While the majority of isolation forests use the binary structure, a framework LSHiForest has demonstrated that the multi-fork isolation tree structure can lead to better detection performance. However, there is no theoretical work answering the fundamentally and practically important question on the optimal tree structure for an isolation forest with respect to the branching factor. In this paper, we establish a theory on isolation efficiency to answer the question and determine the optimal branching factor for an isolation tree. Based on the theoretical underpinning, we design a practical optimal isolation forest OptIForest incorporating clustering based learning to hash which enables more information to be learned from data for better isolation quality. The rationale of our approach relies on a better bias-variance trade-off achieved by bias reduction in OptIForest. Extensive experiments on a series of benchmarking datasets for comparative and ablation studies demonstrate that our approach can efficiently and robustly achieve better detection performance in general than the state-of-the-arts including the deep learning based methods.

SAD: Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection on Dynamic Graphs

Anomaly detection aims to distinguish abnormal instances that deviate significantly from the majority of benign ones. As instances that appear in the real world are naturally connected and can be represented with graphs, graph neural networks become increasingly popular in tackling the anomaly detection problem. Despite the promising results, research on anomaly detection has almost exclusively focused on static graphs while the mining of anomalous patterns from dynamic graphs is rarely studied but has significant application value. In addition, anomaly detection is typically tackled from semi-supervised perspectives due to the lack of sufficient labeled data. However, most proposed methods are limited to merely exploiting labeled data, leaving a large number of unlabeled samples unexplored. In this work, we present semi-supervised anomaly detection (SAD), an end-to-end framework for anomaly detection on dynamic graphs. By a combination of a time-equipped memory bank and a pseudo-label contrastive learning module, SAD is able to fully exploit the potential of large unlabeled samples and uncover underlying anomalies on evolving graph streams. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that SAD efficiently discovers anomalies from dynamic graphs and outperforms existing advanced methods even when provided with only little labeled data.

Huatuo-26M, a Large-scale Chinese Medical QA Dataset

In this paper, we release a largest ever medical Question Answering (QA) dataset with 26 million QA pairs. We benchmark many existing approaches in our dataset in terms of both retrieval and generation. Experimental results show that the existing models perform far lower than expected and the released dataset is still challenging in the pre-trained language model era. Moreover, we also experimentally show the benefit of the proposed dataset in many aspects: (i) trained models for other QA datasets in a zero-shot fashion; and (ii) as external knowledge for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG); and (iii) improving existing pre-trained language models by using the QA pairs as a pre-training corpus in continued training manner. We believe that this dataset will not only contribute to medical research but also facilitate both the patients and clinical doctors. See \url{https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/Huatuo-26M}.

Deep Vision in Analysis and Recognition of Radar Data: Achievements, Advancements and Challenges

Radars are widely used to obtain echo information for effective prediction, such as precipitation nowcasting. In this paper, recent relevant scientific investigation and practical efforts using Deep Learning (DL) models for weather radar data analysis and pattern recognition have been reviewed; particularly, in the fields of beam blockage correction, radar echo extrapolation, and precipitation nowcast. Compared to traditional approaches, present DL methods depict better performance and convenience but suffer from stability and generalization. In addition to recent achievements, the latest advancements and existing challenges are also presented and discussed in this paper, trying to lead to reasonable potentials and trends in this highly-concerned field.

SplitGNN: Splitting GNN for Node Classification with Heterogeneous Attention

With the frequent happening of privacy leakage and the enactment of privacy laws across different countries, data owners are reluctant to directly share their raw data and labels with any other party. In reality, a lot of these raw data are stored in the graph database, especially for finance. For collaboratively building graph neural networks(GNNs), federated learning(FL) may not be an ideal choice for the vertically partitioned setting where privacy and efficiency are the main concerns. Moreover, almost all the existing federated GNNs are mainly designed for homogeneous graphs, which simplify various types of relations as the same type, thus largely limits their performance. We bridge this gap by proposing a split learning-based GNN(SplitGNN), where this model is divided into two sub-models: the local GNN model includes all the private data related computation to generate local node embeddings, whereas the global model calculates global embeddings by aggregating all the participants' local embeddings. Our SplitGNN allows the isolated heterogeneous neighborhood to be collaboratively utilized. To better capture representations, we propose a novel Heterogeneous Attention(HAT) algorithm and use both node-based and path-based attention mechanisms to learn various types of nodes and edges with multi-hop relation features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our SplitGNN on node classification tasks for two standard public datasets and the real-world dataset. Extensive experimental results validate that our proposed SplitGNN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art(SOTA) methods.

Differentially Private Learning with Per-Sample Adaptive Clipping

Privacy in AI remains a topic that draws attention from researchers and the general public in recent years. As one way to implement privacy-preserving AI, differentially private learning is a framework that enables AI models to use differential privacy (DP). To achieve DP in the learning process, existing algorithms typically limit the magnitude of gradients with a constant clipping, which requires carefully tuned due to its significant impact on model performance. As a solution to this issue, latest works NSGD and Auto-S innovatively propose to use normalization instead of clipping to avoid hyperparameter tuning. However, normalization-based approaches like NSGD and Auto-S rely on a monotonic weight function, which imposes excessive weight on small gradient samples and introduces extra deviation to the update. In this paper, we propose a Differentially Private Per-Sample Adaptive Clipping (DP-PSAC) algorithm based on a non-monotonic adaptive weight function, which guarantees privacy without the typical hyperparameter tuning process of using a constant clipping while significantly reducing the deviation between the update and true batch-averaged gradient. We provide a rigorous theoretical convergence analysis and show that with convergence rate at the same order, the proposed algorithm achieves a lower non-vanishing bound, which is maintained over training iterations, compared with NSGD/Auto-S. In addition, through extensive experimental evaluation, we show that DP-PSAC outperforms or matches the state-of-the-art methods on multiple main-stream vision and language tasks.

Inductive Matrix Completion Using Graph Autoencoder

Recently, the graph neural network (GNN) has shown great power in matrix completion by formulating a rating matrix as a bipartite graph and then predicting the link between the corresponding user and item nodes. The majority of GNN-based matrix completion methods are based on Graph Autoencoder (GAE), which considers the one-hot index as input, maps a user (or item) index to a learnable embedding, applies a GNN to learn the node-specific representations based on these learnable embeddings and finally aggregates the representations of the target users and its corresponding item nodes to predict missing links. However, without node content (i.e., side information) for training, the user (or item) specific representation can not be learned in the inductive setting, that is, a model trained on one group of users (or items) cannot adapt to new users (or items). To this end, we propose an inductive matrix completion method using GAE (IMC-GAE), which utilizes the GAE to learn both the user-specific (or item-specific) representation for personalized recommendation and local graph patterns for inductive matrix completion. Specifically, we design two informative node features and employ a layer-wise node dropout scheme in GAE to learn local graph patterns which can be generalized to unseen data. The main contribution of our paper is the capability to efficiently learn local graph patterns in GAE, with good scalability and superior expressiveness compared to previous GNN-based matrix completion methods. Furthermore, extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on several matrix completion benchmarks. Our official code is publicly available.

A Vertical Federated Learning Framework for Graph Convolutional Network

Recently, Graph Neural Network (GNN) has achieved remarkable success in various real-world problems on graph data. However in most industries, data exists in the form of isolated islands and the data privacy and security is also an important issue. In this paper, we propose FedVGCN, a federated GCN learning paradigm for privacy-preserving node classification task under data vertically partitioned setting, which can be generalized to existing GCN models. Specifically, we split the computation graph data into two parts. For each iteration of the training process, the two parties transfer intermediate results to each other under homomorphic encryption. We conduct experiments on benchmark data and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of FedVGCN in the case of GraphSage.