Introducing CausalBench: A Flexible Benchmark Framework for Causal Analysis and Machine Learning

While witnessing the exceptional success of machine learning (ML) technologies in many applications, users are starting to notice a critical shortcoming of ML: correlation is a poor substitute for causation. The conventional way to discover causal relationships is to use randomized controlled experiments (RCT); in many situations, however, these are impractical or sometimes unethical. Causal learning from observational data offers a promising alternative. While being relatively recent, causal learning aims to go far beyond conventional machine learning, yet several major challenges remain. Unfortunately, advances are hampered due to the lack of unified benchmark datasets, algorithms, metrics, and evaluation service interfaces for causal learning. In this paper, we introduce {\em CausalBench}, a transparent, fair, and easy-to-use evaluation platform, aiming to (a) enable the advancement of research in causal learning by facilitating scientific collaboration in novel algorithms, datasets, and metrics and (b) promote scientific objectivity, reproducibility, fairness, and awareness of bias in causal learning research. CausalBench provides services for benchmarking data, algorithms, models, and metrics, impacting the needs of a broad of scientific and engineering disciplines.

Better Not to Propagate: Understanding Edge Uncertainty and Over-smoothing in Signed Graph Neural Networks

Traditional Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) rely on network homophily, which can lead to performance degradation due to over-smoothing in many real-world heterophily scenarios. Recent studies analyze the smoothing effect (separability) after message-passing (MP), depending on the expectation of node features. Regarding separability gain, they provided theoretical backgrounds on over-smoothing caused by various propagation schemes, including positive, signed, and blocked MPs. More recently, by extending these theorems, some works have suggested improvements in signed propagation under multiple classes. However, prior works assume that the error ratio of all propagation schemes is fixed, failing to investigate this phenomenon correctly. To solve this problem, we propose a novel method for estimating homophily and edge error ratio, integrated with dynamic selection between blocked and signed propagation during training. Our theoretical analysis, supported by extensive experiments, demonstrates that blocking MP can be more effective than signed propagation under high edge error ratios, improving the performance in both homophilic and heterophilic graphs.

Prioritizing Potential Wetland Areas via Region-to-Region Knowledge Transfer and Adaptive Propagation

Wetlands are important to communities, offering benefits ranging from water purification, and flood protection to recreation and tourism. Therefore, identifying and prioritizing potential wetland areas is a critical decision problem. While data-driven solutions are feasible, this is complicated by significant data sparsity due to the low proportion of wetlands (3-6\%) in many areas of interest in the southwestern US. This makes it hard to develop data-driven models that can help guide the identification of additional wetland areas. To solve this limitation, we propose two strategies: (1) The first of these is knowledge transfer from regions with rich wetlands (such as the Eastern US) to sparser regions (such as the Southwestern area with few wetlands). Recognizing that these regions are likely to be very different from each other in terms of soil characteristics, population distribution, and land use, we propose a domain disentanglement strategy that identifies and transfers only the applicable aspects of the learned model. (2) We complement this with a spatial data enrichment strategy that relies on an adaptive propagation mechanism. This mechanism differentiates between node pairs that have positive and negative impacts on each other for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). To summarize, given two spatial cells belonging to different regions, we identify domain-specific and domain-shareable features, and, for each region, we rely on adaptive propagation to enrich features with the features of surrounding cells. We conduct rigorous experiments to substantiate our proposed method's effectiveness, robustness, and scalability compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Additionally, an ablation study demonstrates that each module is essential in prioritizing potential wetlands, which justifies our assumption.

Review-Based Cross-Domain Recommendation via Hyperbolic Embedding and Hierarchy-Aware Domain Disentanglement

The issue of data sparsity poses a significant challenge to recommender systems. In response to this, algorithms that leverage side information such as review texts have been proposed. Furthermore, Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR), which captures domain-shareable knowledge and transfers it from a richer domain (source) to a sparser one (target), has received notable attention. Nevertheless, the majority of existing methodologies assume a Euclidean embedding space, encountering difficulties in accurately representing richer text information and managing complex interactions between users and items. This paper advocates a hyperbolic CDR approach based on review texts for modeling user-item relationships. We first emphasize that conventional distance-based domain alignment techniques may cause problems because small modifications in hyperbolic geometry result in magnified perturbations, ultimately leading to the collapse of hierarchical structures. To address this challenge, we propose hierarchy-aware embedding and domain alignment schemes that adjust the scale to extract domain-shareable information without disrupting structural forms. The process involves the initial embedding of review texts in hyperbolic space, followed by feature extraction incorporating degree-based normalization and structure alignment. We conducted extensive experiments to substantiate the efficiency, robustness, and scalability of our proposed model in comparison to state-of-the-art baselines.

Finding Heterophilic Neighbors via Confidence-based Subgraph Matching for Semi-supervised Node Classification

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have proven to be powerful in many graph-based applications. However, they fail to generalize well under heterophilic setups, where neighbor nodes have different labels. To address this challenge, we employ a confidence ratio as a hyper-parameter, assuming that some of the edges are disassortative (heterophilic). Here, we propose a two-phased algorithm. Firstly, we determine edge coefficients through subgraph matching using a supplementary module. Then, we apply GNNs with a modified label propagation mechanism to utilize the edge coefficients effectively. Specifically, our supplementary module identifies a certain proportion of task-irrelevant edges based on a given confidence ratio. Using the remaining edges, we employ the widely used optimal transport to measure the similarity between two nodes with their subgraphs. Finally, using the coefficients as supplementary information on GNNs, we improve the label propagation mechanism which can prevent two nodes with smaller weights from being closer. The experiments on benchmark datasets show that our model alleviates over-smoothing and improves performance.

Is Signed Message Essential for Graph Neural Networks?

Message-passing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which collect information from adjacent nodes, achieve satisfying results on homophilic graphs. However, their performances are dismal in heterophilous graphs, and many researchers have proposed a plethora of schemes to solve this problem. Especially, flipping the sign of edges is rooted in a strong theoretical foundation, and attains significant performance enhancements. Nonetheless, previous analyses assume a binary class scenario and they may suffer from confined applicability. This paper extends the prior understandings to multi-class scenarios and points out two drawbacks: (1) the sign of multi-hop neighbors depends on the message propagation paths and may incur inconsistency, (2) it also increases the prediction uncertainty (e.g., conflict evidence) which can impede the stability of the algorithm. Based on the theoretical understanding, we introduce a novel strategy that is applicable to multi-class graphs. The proposed scheme combines confidence calibration to secure robustness while reducing uncertainty. We show the efficacy of our theorem through extensive experiments on six benchmark graph datasets.

Signed Directed Graph Contrastive Learning with Laplacian Augmentation

Graph contrastive learning has become a powerful technique for several graph mining tasks. It learns discriminative representation from different perspectives of augmented graphs. Ubiquitous in our daily life, singed-directed graphs are the most complex and tricky to analyze among various graph types. That is why singed-directed graph contrastive learning has not been studied much yet, while there are many contrastive studies for unsigned and undirected. Thus, this paper proposes a novel signed-directed graph contrastive learning, SDGCL. It makes two different structurally perturbed graph views and gets node representations via magnetic Laplacian perturbation. We use a node-level contrastive loss to maximize the mutual information between the two graph views. The model is jointly learned with contrastive and supervised objectives. The graph encoder of SDGCL does not depend on social theories or predefined assumptions. Therefore it does not require finding triads or selecting neighbors to aggregate. It leverages only the edge signs and directions via magnetic Laplacian. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first to introduce magnetic Laplacian perturbation and signed spectral graph contrastive learning. The superiority of the proposed model is demonstrated through exhaustive experiments on four real-world datasets. SDGCL shows better performance than other state-of-the-art on four evaluation metrics.

Flip Initial Features: Generalization of Neural Networks for Semi-supervised Node Classification

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used under semi-supervised settings. Prior studies have mainly focused on finding appropriate graph filters (e.g., aggregation schemes) to generalize well for both homophilic and heterophilic graphs. Even though these approaches are essential and effective, they still suffer from the sparsity in initial node features inherent in the bag-of-words representation. Common in semi-supervised learning where the training samples often fail to cover the entire dimensions of graph filters (hyperplanes), this can precipitate over-fitting of specific dimensions in the first projection matrix. To deal with this problem, we suggest a simple and novel strategy; create additional space by flipping the initial features and hyperplane simultaneously. Training in both the original and in the flip space can provide precise updates of learnable parameters. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt that effectively moderates the overfitting problem in GNN. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed technique improves the node classification accuracy up to 40.2 %

DiVa: An Accelerator for Differentially Private Machine Learning

The widespread deployment of machine learning (ML) is raising serious concerns on protecting the privacy of users who contributed to the collection of training data. Differential privacy (DP) is rapidly gaining momentum in the industry as a practical standard for privacy protection. Despite DP's importance, however, little has been explored within the computer systems community regarding the implication of this emerging ML algorithm on system designs. In this work, we conduct a detailed workload characterization on a state-of-the-art differentially private ML training algorithm named DP-SGD. We uncover several unique properties of DP-SGD (e.g., its high memory capacity and computation requirements vs. non-private ML), root-causing its key bottlenecks. Based on our analysis, we propose an accelerator for differentially private ML named DiVa, which provides a significant improvement in compute utilization, leading to 2.6x higher energy-efficiency vs. conventional systolic arrays.

DaRE: A Cross-Domain Recommender System with Domain-aware Feature Extraction and Review Encoder

Recent advent in recommender systems, especially text-aided methods and CDR (Cross-Domain Recommendation) leads to promising results in solving data-sparsity and cold-start problems. Despite such progress, prior algorithms either require user overlapping or ignore domain-aware feature extraction. In addition, text-aided methods exceedingly emphasize aggregated documents and fail to capture the specifics embedded in individual reviews. To overcome such limitations, we propose a novel method, named DaRE (Domainaware Feature Extraction and Review Encoder), a comprehensive solution that consists of three key components; text-based representation learning, domain-aware feature extraction, and a review encoder. DaRE debilitate noises by separating domain-invariant features from domain-specific features through selective adversarial training. DaRE extracts features from aggregated documents, and the review encoder fine-tunes the representations by aligning them with the features extracted from individual reviews. Experiments on four real-world datasets show the superiority of DaRE over state-ofthe-art single-domain and cross-domain methodologies, achieving 9.2 % and 3.6 % improvements, respectively. We upload our implementations (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DaRE-9CC9/) for a reproducibility