Maximum Likelihood Estimation on Stochastic Blockmodels for Directed Graph Clustering

This paper studies the directed graph clustering problem through the lens of statistics, where we formulate clustering as estimating underlying communities in the directed stochastic block model (DSBM). We conduct the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) on the DSBM and thereby ascertain the most probable community assignment given the observed graph structure. In addition to the statistical point of view, we further establish the equivalence between this MLE formulation and a novel flow optimization heuristic, which jointly considers two important directed graph statistics: edge density and edge orientation. Building on this new formulation of directed clustering, we introduce two efficient and interpretable directed clustering algorithms, a spectral clustering algorithm and a semidefinite programming based clustering algorithm. We provide a theoretical upper bound on the number of misclustered vertices of the spectral clustering algorithm using tools from matrix perturbation theory. We compare, both quantitatively and qualitatively, our proposed algorithms with existing directed clustering methods on both synthetic and real-world data, thus providing further ground to our theoretical contributions.

STEntConv: Predicting Disagreement with Stance Detection and a Signed Graph Convolutional Network

The rise of social media platforms has led to an increase in polarised online discussions, especially on political and socio-cultural topics such as elections and climate change. We propose a simple and novel unsupervised method to predict whether the authors of two posts agree or disagree, leveraging user stances about named entities obtained from their posts. We present STEntConv, a model which builds a graph of users and named entities weighted by stance and trains a Signed Graph Convolutional Network (SGCN) to detect disagreement between comment and reply posts. We run experiments and ablation studies and show that including this information improves disagreement detection performance on a dataset of Reddit posts for a range of controversial subreddit topics, without the need for platform-specific features or user history.

Rough Transformers for Continuous and Efficient Time-Series Modelling

Time-series data in real-world medical settings typically exhibit long-range dependencies and are observed at non-uniform intervals. In such contexts, traditional sequence-based recurrent models struggle. To overcome this, researchers replace recurrent architectures with Neural ODE-based models to model irregularly sampled data and use Transformer-based architectures to account for long-range dependencies. Despite the success of these two approaches, both incur very high computational costs for input sequences of moderate lengths and greater. To mitigate this, we introduce the Rough Transformer, a variation of the Transformer model which operates on continuous-time representations of input sequences and incurs significantly reduced computational costs, critical for addressing long-range dependencies common in medical contexts. In particular, we propose multi-view signature attention, which uses path signatures to augment vanilla attention and to capture both local and global dependencies in input data, while remaining robust to changes in the sequence length and sampling frequency. We find that Rough Transformers consistently outperform their vanilla attention counterparts while obtaining the benefits of Neural ODE-based models using a fraction of the computational time and memory resources on synthetic and real-world time-series tasks.

Decentralized and Lifelong-Adaptive Multi-Agent Collaborative Learning

Decentralized and lifelong-adaptive multi-agent collaborative learning aims to enhance collaboration among multiple agents without a central server, with each agent solving varied tasks over time. To achieve efficient collaboration, agents should: i) autonomously identify beneficial collaborative relationships in a decentralized manner; and ii) adapt to dynamically changing task observations. In this paper, we propose DeLAMA, a decentralized multi-agent lifelong collaborative learning algorithm with dynamic collaboration graphs. To promote autonomous collaboration relationship learning, we propose a decentralized graph structure learning algorithm, eliminating the need for external priors. To facilitate adaptation to dynamic tasks, we design a memory unit to capture the agents' accumulated learning history and knowledge, while preserving finite storage consumption. To further augment the system's expressive capabilities and computational efficiency, we apply algorithm unrolling, leveraging the advantages of both mathematical optimization and neural networks. This allows the agents to `learn to collaborate' through the supervision of training tasks. Our theoretical analysis verifies that inter-agent collaboration is communication efficient under a small number of communication rounds. The experimental results verify its ability to facilitate the discovery of collaboration strategies and adaptation to dynamic learning scenarios, achieving a 98.80% reduction in MSE and a 188.87% improvement in classification accuracy. We expect our work can serve as a foundational technique to facilitate future works towards an intelligent, decentralized, and dynamic multi-agent system. Code is available at https://github.com/ShuoTang123/DeLAMA.

Hypergraph Node Classification With Graph Neural Networks

Hypergraphs, with hyperedges connecting more than two nodes, are key for modelling higher-order interactions in real-world data. The success of graph neural networks (GNNs) reveals the capability of neural networks to process data with pairwise interactions. This inspires the usage of neural networks for data with higher-order interactions, thereby leading to the development of hypergraph neural networks (HyperGNNs). GNNs and HyperGNNs are typically considered distinct since they are designed for data on different geometric topologies. However, in this paper, we theoretically demonstrate that, in the context of node classification, most HyperGNNs can be approximated using a GNN with a weighted clique expansion of the hypergraph. This leads to WCE-GNN, a simple and efficient framework comprising a GNN and a weighted clique expansion (WCE), for hypergraph node classification. Experiments on nine real-world hypergraph node classification benchmarks showcase that WCE-GNN demonstrates not only higher classification accuracy compared to state-of-the-art HyperGNNs, but also superior memory and runtime efficiency.

A Characterization Theorem for Equivariant Networks with Point-wise Activations

Equivariant neural networks have shown improved performance, expressiveness and sample complexity on symmetrical domains. But for some specific symmetries, representations, and choice of coordinates, the most common point-wise activations, such as ReLU, are not equivariant, hence they cannot be employed in the design of equivariant neural networks. The theorem we present in this paper describes all possible combinations of finite-dimensional representations, choice of coordinates and point-wise activations to obtain an exactly equivariant layer, generalizing and strengthening existing characterizations. Notable cases of practical relevance are discussed as corollaries. Indeed, we prove that rotation-equivariant networks can only be invariant, as it happens for any network which is equivariant with respect to connected compact groups. Then, we discuss implications of our findings when applied to important instances of exactly equivariant networks. First, we completely characterize permutation equivariant networks such as Invariant Graph Networks with point-wise nonlinearities and their geometric counterparts, highlighting a plethora of models whose expressive power and performance are still unknown. Second, we show that feature spaces of disentangled steerable convolutional neural networks are trivial representations.

Hypergraph Transformer for Semi-Supervised Classification

Hypergraphs play a pivotal role in the modelling of data featuring higher-order relations involving more than two entities. Hypergraph neural networks emerge as a powerful tool for processing hypergraph-structured data, delivering remarkable performance across various tasks, e.g., hypergraph node classification. However, these models struggle to capture global structural information due to their reliance on local message passing. To address this challenge, we propose a novel hypergraph learning framework, HyperGraph Transformer (HyperGT). HyperGT uses a Transformer-based neural network architecture to effectively consider global correlations among all nodes and hyperedges. To incorporate local structural information, HyperGT has two distinct designs: i) a positional encoding based on the hypergraph incidence matrix, offering valuable insights into node-node and hyperedge-hyperedge interactions; and ii) a hypergraph structure regularization in the loss function, capturing connectivities between nodes and hyperedges. Through these designs, HyperGT achieves comprehensive hypergraph representation learning by effectively incorporating global interactions while preserving local connectivity patterns. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world hypergraph node classification tasks showcase that HyperGT consistently outperforms existing methods, establishing new state-of-the-art benchmarks. Ablation studies affirm the effectiveness of the individual designs of our model.

Hypergraph-MLP: Learning on Hypergraphs without Message Passing

Hypergraphs are vital in modelling data with higher-order relations containing more than two entities, gaining prominence in machine learning and signal processing. Many hypergraph neural networks leverage message passing over hypergraph structures to enhance node representation learning, yielding impressive performances in tasks like hypergraph node classification. However, these message-passing-based models face several challenges, including oversmoothing as well as high latency and sensitivity to structural perturbations at inference time. To tackle those challenges, we propose an alternative approach where we integrate the information about hypergraph structures into training supervision without explicit message passing, thus also removing the reliance on it at inference. Specifically, we introduce Hypergraph-MLP, a novel learning framework for hypergraph-structured data, where the learning model is a straightforward multilayer perceptron (MLP) supervised by a loss function based on a notion of signal smoothness on hypergraphs. Experiments on hypergraph node classification tasks demonstrate that Hypergraph-MLP achieves competitive performance compared to existing baselines, and is considerably faster and more robust against structural perturbations at inference.

Neural Latent Geometry Search: Product Manifold Inference via Gromov-Hausdorff-Informed Bayesian Optimization

Recent research indicates that the performance of machine learning models can be improved by aligning the geometry of the latent space with the underlying data structure. Rather than relying solely on Euclidean space, researchers have proposed using hyperbolic and spherical spaces with constant curvature, or combinations thereof, to better model the latent space and enhance model performance. However, little attention has been given to the problem of automatically identifying the optimal latent geometry for the downstream task. We mathematically define this novel formulation and coin it as neural latent geometry search (NLGS). More specifically, we introduce a principled method that searches for a latent geometry composed of a product of constant curvature model spaces with minimal query evaluations. To accomplish this, we propose a novel notion of distance between candidate latent geometries based on the Gromov-Hausdorff distance from metric geometry. In order to compute the Gromov-Hausdorff distance, we introduce a mapping function that enables the comparison of different manifolds by embedding them in a common high-dimensional ambient space. Finally, we design a graph search space based on the calculated distances between candidate manifolds and use Bayesian optimization to search for the optimal latent geometry in a query-efficient manner. This is a general method which can be applied to search for the optimal latent geometry for a variety of models and downstream tasks. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets confirm the efficacy of our method in identifying the optimal latent geometry for multiple machine learning problems.